The Uneasy Heroism of Taxi Driver

Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) is a film that escapes conventional genre definition, something that a quick survey of online movie reviews reveals: Scheib reads it as a psychological thriller — albeit one turned upon its head because the film’s protagonist is also the source of psychological fear¹; Dread Central claims it as one of their own, citing the penultimate scene of the film as characteristic of a “slasher” film², while choosing to ignore the markedly Noir aesthetic of the rest of the film. Applying Pramaggiore and Wallis’³ definition of Film Noir — which according to Maltby also covers under its umbrella the genres of “Detective Mystery Melodramas”, “Social Problem Crime Films”, and “Psychological Dramas”⁴— we find that it mostly fits but for a few exceptions⁵. I argue that Taxi Driver is difficult to categorise because it undermines the very root of the mythic traditions of the fictive narrative⁶, specifically the romantic myth of the Hero’s Quest⁷. This is different from anti-Heroism, where in the typical Hollywood narrative it functions to question the institution, but never basic morality.

Frye states that the “affinity between the mythical and the abstractly literary illuminates many aspects of fiction”. This affinity can be seen in how myth is incorporated in Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey⁸, and then in Vogler — a “Hollywood protégé” of Campbell⁹ — whom delineated 12 phases of character transformation¹⁰ that corresponds with the Heroic Quest within Frye’s Mythos of Summer. This Hollywood-ean idea of the Hero’s Journey is present in Film Noir as well, although he or she does not always attain the “final mastery of the problem” in the conventional sense, such as in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and a more recent example of Neo-Noir, The Salton Sea by DJ. Caruso (2002). Taxi Driver, if one were to look at the surface of the film, has Travis Bickle attain “final mastery of the problem”, in the form of cleaning the “streets” of “scum”, and actually presents Frye’s fourth stage of the Heroic Romance, where we have “Anagnorisis, or recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride”¹¹ — Bickle’s hospital bed is surrounded by testaments to his “heroism” at the apartment where he rescued Iris, and at the end of the film Betsy acknowledges his act. Hence given what Todorov calls the “verisimilitude”¹² of the film to the mythos of the Hero, Bickle given his “asocial” tendencies could be seen as an anti-Heroic figure, but ultimately with good intent. But I argue that Taxi Driver means question this idea of “good intent” by twisting the Heroic myth.

Throughout the entire film, Bickle’s values are consistently questioned at every turn — whether when he attempts to bring Betsy to a porn film for a date, or through Iris whom he apparently “rescues” from Sport. What is made clear about his purpose, his self-assigned “dragon-killing theme” if we were to apply Frye¹³, is that he intends to “wash all this scum off the streets”. But in a telling scene where he first starts out as a cab driver (before he meets Betsy for the first time), he winds up the window as he passes a cleaning truck spraying water over the roads to clean the streets. He intends to cleanse, but does not submit to cleansing himself.

Another thing that should strike the viewer is Bickle’s complicity in the apparent amorality of the “scum”. According to Bickle himself, his vehicle does not discriminate:

Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. 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.

His moral ambiguity is most apparent when the film switches from Bickle’s attempted assassination of Senator Palantine to the shootout at Sport’s apartment, leaving all its occupants dead except for Iris and Bickle (although Roger Ebert¹⁴ proposes an alternative reading of the film where the final scene is the wish-fulfillment dream of a dying Travis Bickle). To him, both are variations on a theme¹⁵, where he is the agent that enacts cleansing.

However, Bickle’s narrative is still presented within the framework of Vogler’s Hero’s Journey, setting up dissonant poles of Bickle’s characterisation through narrative structure (Hero’s Journey), and his characterisation through diegetic acts as shown above.

This dissonance is further tweaked by Bickle’s off-center moral compass, which throws the spectators own moral compass off balance. The spectator comes in with genre expectations formed by the associations that the film draws: Bickle figures as the Vietnam War veteran — few films dealing with the Vietnam war had been made by 1976 — whom are figures of masculinity and patriotism; the Noir aesthetic of the film, especially with Bickle’s narration, nudges the spectator to find the central mystery in the film that Bickle is slated to solve; the spectator watching the film thinking it’s a psychological drama would expect the source of danger to be Other to the protagonist, and not Bickle himself. Taxi Driver overturns every one of these expectations by setting up Bickle as a Heroic (or anti-Heroic character), and then overturning genre and moral assumptions: the Vietnam War veteran is mentally unstable, and proven to be physically dangerous to society (in the case of the attempted assassination) and morally warped (no qualms about killing, as long as they are “scum”); the mystery or crime that the spectator expects to solve does not exist, or only exists because Bickle creates the problem, i.e. his fixation with “washing” the streets of its “scum”, while its vice is shown to be mainly benign while he himself is a violent force; Bickle’s confrontation with his own reflection in the mirror makes it apparent that the spectator is not meant to identify with him as even he himself as problems establishing rapport through the apparatus of perception — caught in a Lacanian pre-mirror phase. Applying Frye’s “dragon-killing theme”, we conventionally seek external “Leviathans” or “sterility of the land” which Bickle seems to assign this to the “streets”. However, Bickle begins the film on the streets, and never seems to move out of it. In this pre-mirror phase phase, he sees the streets, but is unable to see that it is perhaps a reflection of him. He is of the streets, and therefore part of this “dragon” that he is attempting to “slay”. One could say that this is classic Freudian disavowal, and that he externalises blame by directing it towards Palantine, and eventually finds a perhaps more appropriate target in Sport.

In conclusion, Bickle is an upsetting character because he is not a character that is made to fit neatly into the apparatus of the cinema. The presentation of Bickle defies the spectators’ attempts to identify with him, nudging him or her to question the morality of the film.

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