Cinema Speculation

Taxi Driver

(1976)

In Martin Scorsese’s first feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door, the film’s lead character J.R. (Harvey Keitel) starts his relationship with the Girl (Zina Bethune) when he spots her on the Staten Island ferry reading a French fashion magazine that he notices has a picture from The Searchers in it. Then Harvey proceeds, at great length and detail, to describe the “Wayne epic” to Zina.

When the guinea hoods of Mean Streets go to the movies after ripping off the Scarsdale kids of their firecracker money, it’s The Searchers they go see (though in real life I doubt Scorsese would be as tolerant of Tony’s buffoonish carrying on in the cinema as Charlie seems to be).

Like the way Kenneth Anger scored Scorpio Rising with the rock ’n’ roll 45s from his own personal turntable, Scorsese does the same thing in Who’s That Knocking at My Door, focusing primarily on his fifties rhythm and blues and doo-wop 45s. Defiantly ignoring the music of the day (i.e. the British Invasion), save one group, naturally, The Searchers.

Aside from shout-outs to The Searchers, other John Ford touchstones in Scorsese’s oeuvre include in Who’s That Knocking at My Door when J.R. holds court with the Girl on Lee Marvin’s character Liberty Valance.

And in his Roger Corman-produced low-budget epic Boxcar Bertha, where his whole cinematic conception of the thirties seems derived from Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath. Also in the way Bogdanovich in The Last Picture Show, Spielberg in The Sugarland Express, and Milius in Dillinger use Ford regular Ben Johnson as the personification of the Ford mythic ideal, is how young Martin uses John Ford regular John Carradine in Boxcar Bertha.

Then there’s Paul Schrader’s two-script reworking of The Searchers, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Schrader’s own Hardcore. Taxi Driver isn’t a “paraphrased remake” of The Searchers like Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? is a paraphrased remake of Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby or De Palma’s Dressed to Kill is a paraphrased remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But it’s about as close as you can get to a paraphrased remake and not actually being one. Robert De Niro’s taxi driving protagonist Travis Bickle is John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards.

In Scorsese on Scorsese, the director explained: “I was thinking about the John Wayne character in The Searchers. He doesn’t say much. . . . He doesn’t belong anywhere, since he just fought a war he believed in and lost, but he has a great love within him that’s been stamped out. He gets carried away, so that during the long search for the young girl, he kills more buffalo than necessary because it’s less food for the Comanche. But throughout, he’s determined that they’ll find her, as he says, ‘As sure as the turning of the earth.’”

Cybill Shepherd’s Betsy is Martha (the woman Ethan adores but can’t have). Jodie Foster’s child prostitute Iris Steensma is Natalie Wood’s Debbie (the innocent in the hands of savages he can save). And Harvey Keitel’s pimp Sport is Henry Brandon’s Comanche warrior Scar. In Who’s That Knocking at My Door Harvey talks to Zina at length about Brandon’s Scar, “He was more nasty than Wayne could ever get [that’s debatable], but then he was the bad guy. There were a lotta nasty Comanches in that picture.”

In Ford’s film it’s not just the young girl who must be saved, it’s her white skin and Anglo Saxon heritage that must be avenged, after her life-is-not-worth-living defilement by the dark-skinned savage Scar.

But to get at the heart of the duality between the two pictures, you have to go back to Paul Schrader’s script and his original intention.

Taxi Driver tells the story of a lonely man named Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro). He’s one of many faceless people existing by themselves that big American cities are filled with. Solitary men, living solitary lives, without family or friends or loved ones.

His only form of self-expression is a handwritten diary he endlessly pores over which nobody will ever read.

At the film’s beginning, you could almost classify Travis as a disaffected innocent. But part of the pull of the picture is watching him slowly lose that innocence. And what becomes both scary and thrilling is watching what replaces that lost innocence.

Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese’s sympathetic portrait of this malcontent chronicles his day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month existence. And as the film pulls us along through Travis’ routine, we see how bloody easy it is for him to drift into violent fantasies, perceived injustices, and a thirst for action that only a bloodletting will quench. We see how easy it is for Travis—all by his lonesome—to become at first a crackpot, then a nutjob, then finally a sociopathic time bomb.

One of the great anxieties of Taxi Driver is that it’s shot from Travis Bickle’s perspective. And that perspective is of a man who’s a racist.

Not a loudmouth racist like Peter Boyle’s character Joe, or the type of troublemaking redneck movie racist that Don Stroud specialized in at the time.

Travis never says anything overtly racist about the black residents of New York he shares the streets with.

He never calls them “niggers.”

Characters in Mean Streets use that slur. As does Scorsese himself, playing Travis’ cuckolded backseat passenger who muses about what a .44 Magnum can do to his wife’s pussy.

Peter Boyle’s Wizard refers to black folks as “mau-maus.”

But the only time Travis refers to black folks it’s as “spooks.” And he makes a case for his fairness as a taxi driver saying, “Some won’t even take spooks. Don’t make no difference to me.”

Yet the film makes it obvious he sees black males as figures of malevolent criminality. He’s repelled by any contact with them. They are to be feared or at the very least avoided. And since we watch the film from Travis’ point of view, we do as well (that amazing low-angle dolly shot of the black pimp, in the all-night cafeteria, tapping the table with his finger). Part of the anxiety the viewer feels while watching the movie comes from the question the movie forces you to ask yourself.

Is this movie—Taxi Driver—a movie about a racist, or is it a racist movie?

The answer is clearly the former. And what makes the film a gutsy masterpiece is it dares to pose that question to the audience, and then allows them to devise their own answer. In the years since he wrote the screenplay, Paul Schrader has articulated that Travis’ racism stems from the fact that the frustrated and powerless poor tend to take out their resentment not on the powerful class above them, but the even more powerless class below them. And while in a larger and more political context that is true, that’s not the most important reason that Schrader made Travis a racist. The real reason for Travis’ antagonism towards black folks is because it matches Ethan Edwards’ hatred of the Comanches in The Searchers. Yet as rough as Scorsese’s picture is, it’s still a watered-down version of Schrader’s original nihilistic text. Because in Schrader’s original script, all the characters at the end that Travis kills were black. Harvey Keitel’s pimp Sport was black, as was the guy who managed the fuck hotel that Murray Moston played in Scorsese’s film.

According to Schrader, he was asked by the producers and Columbia Pictures to change the character of Sport from black to white because the race riots of a few years earlier still cast a long shadow. And there was a fear if any violence broke out in a cinema, it would cause the film to be yanked from theatres for public safety. As happened, Schrader pointed out, a few years later to Walter Hill’s The Warriors.

Okay, is it possible Columbia could be timid about a provocative film like Taxi Driver?

Hell yeah, over thirty years later Columbia Pictures was timid as hell about the reaction to Django Unchained.

But Columbia Pictures was worried about what, exactly?

Violence breaking out among black patrons?

Why, because the film provoked violence, or that black ticket buyers would be so incensed that the film’s pimp character was portrayed by a black actor that they would riot in the cinema in outrage?

If that was the case, how come there weren’t riots across the country during screenings of Death Wish? In that film Charles Bronson pretended to shoot more black actors than white.

The Warriors analogy doesn’t really work either. It wasn’t that film’s on-screen mayhem or Michael Beck that caused violent incidents to break out in a few of the houses screening that picture. It was because since it was a gang picture, gang members showed up at some engagements during opening weekend.

Taxi Driver might have provoked a couple of angry think pieces in a few newspapers . . . but actual violence?

Considering, during the seventies, there was no shortage of black male criminality on display on movie theatre screens or TV picture tubes, the studio and the producers’ fear of outraged violent black males not only seems far-fetched, it smacks of Travis Bickle’s warped reasoning.

So let’s get this straight—Columbia Pictures had no problem whatsoever with all those villainous Caribbean brothers plotting, scheming, and murdering in The Deep, but Taxi Driver was a bridge too far?

Any way you slice it, Scorsese, and producers Michael and Julia Phillips, and Columbia Pictures changing the pimp character of Sport from black to white was a societal compromise.

And frankly, the only reason it can survive a compromise of that magnitude is the magnetic performance of Harvey Keitel as Sport.

I mean, seriously, Taxi Driver without Harvey Keitel?

What would that even be?

You associate Keitel so much with the movie, the movie without him seems as unthinkable as the movie without Robert De Niro.

Yet when the Phillipses first set Taxi Driver up at Columbia Pictures—back when Robert Mulligan was the director—it wasn’t Robert De Niro who was earmarked for the role of Travis Bickle, but Jeff Bridges, coming off of an Academy Award nomination for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and an acclaimed performance in the critical sleeper Hearts of the West.

Now to be fair, seemingly, Scorsese never considered the change of Sport’s race from black to white as big a deal as I do.

I’m pretty sure where Mr. Scorsese was coming from—if there was a chance of riots leading to the film being pulled from cinema screens that wasn’t a chance worth taking. Besides, Marty had wanted the film to have a part for Harvey Keitel and he was frustrated that it didn’t (he originally offered Harvey the part of Cybill Shepherd’s flirtatious coworker, but the actor turned it down).

So if by making the pimp character white, that opened up a good role for Harvey Keitel, great! Problem solved.

But Keitel forced the fraudulent aspect of the conceit because he wanted to meet a real-life counterpart.

Yes, Harvey Keitel wanted to meet a real-life white New York pimp. Not realizing that the “Great White Pimp” was a mythological cinematic creation. Nevertheless, Schrader was tasked with hitting the streets of New York looking for a white pimp for Harvey to base his character on. Needless to say, since there weren’t any white pimps in New York, Schrader never found one. He said, every once in a while somebody might say, “Yeah, I think I heard about one who hangs out about six blocks away, but I ain’t never seen ’em.” If there was a white pimp out there, Schrader said, he never found him. So Keitel was forced to do all of his character research with a black gentleman of leisure.

So, granting the idea of Taxi Driver without either Robert De Niro or Harvey Keitel is unthinkable, let’s think the unthinkable.

Let’s imagine that famous scene in Taxi Driver, where Travis and Sport meet each other for the first time and the taxi driver approaches the pimp about Iris (“That bitch will suck your cock till it explodes!”).

Let’s imagine the same scene, but with Jeff Bridges playing a less urban, more hayseed version of Travis, and Max The Mack Julien playing a black, silky smooth Sport. No doubt when Schrader first imagined Sport in his mind’s eye, it was an actor like Max Julien he imagined portraying him (Julien is so perfect, Schrader could have written Sport with him in mind).

A colorfully threaded Sport, sporting a miniature purple fuzzy fedora balanced on his short-haired afro, talking about Jodie Foster “sucking your cock till it explodes!”

Does the subtextual racism of Taxi Driver now become text?

Or does it just make the whole tableau more convincingly authentic?

And who couldn’t handle that?

Black audiences?

Or is it more likely that the white folks financing the movie were the ones made to feel uncomfortable by the imagery in Schrader’s original script? So uncomfortable that a fear of black males causing violence in cinemas was conveniently trotted out as an excuse to change Schrader’s Sport from black to white?

With all their anxiety, it begs the question, why did Columbia Pictures want to do Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver in the first place?

Well, one of the big reasons was because Schrader was one of the reddest hot screenwriters in town, due to the gobsmacking price he elicited from Warner Bros. for his script The Yakuza.

Also, it didn’t hurt that the three producers of the smash hit The Sting, Michael and Julia Phillips, and (superstar producer) Tony Bill, brought the material to Columbia. But what really encouraged Columbia Pictures to green-light Schrader’s screenplay (originally with Robert Mulligan at the helm), had nothing to do with its literary allusions to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, or its similarity to Arthur Bremer’s diary, but its cracked-mirror reflection of the Michael Winner-directed, Charles Bronson-starring, smash hit vigilante action drama Death Wish (as well as other revenge-based dramas, very popular at the time).

With seminal classics like Taxi Driver, it’s easy to just think of a world where they always existed and were always destined to exist.

But that’s not how a hot potato screenplay like Taxi Driver gets produced by a major Hollywood studio. The truth is if you revere Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (like I do), then you have Michael Winner’s Death Wish to thank for its existence.*

The Charles Bronson New York vigilante drama Death Wish opened in July 1974. The narrator of its trailer bombastically proclaimed, “This is a story of a man who decided to clean up the most violent city in the world!” By 1975, one year after Death Wish and one year before Taxi Driver, violent revenge dramas would begin to flood the cinemas of the world. William Margold, first-string film critic for the sex rag the Hollywood Press, dubbed the genre (amusingly) “Revengeamatics.”

Like Bronson would go after New York muggers over the death of his wife and rape of his daughter in Death Wish, George Kennedy would go after European Baader-Meinhof inspired terrorists over the death of his family in The “Human” Factor.

CIA assassin James Caan would seek revenge against his former partner/best friend Robert Duvall in Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite (not a great Peckinpah movie, but with the last great slow-motion Peckinpah action sequences).

Alain Delon’s top-of-the-heap hit man would kill all the Mafia dons responsible for blowing up his wife and child (in a car bomb meant for him) in No Way Out (which I saw at the Old Town Mall, with my mother, on a double feature with the Peter Fonda and Telly Savalas violent South African diamond heist flick, Killer Force).

Grindhouse men-pushed-too-far potboilers like Johnny Firecloud and The No Mercy Man would lure cars to drive-ins.

Jan-Michael Vincent’s Carrol Jo Hummer would dump sexy bad guy L. Q. Jones in a garbage dumpster and drive his truck, “the Blue Mule,” through that big glass sign in White Line Fever.

Phil Karlson’s seminal action classic of 1973, Walking Tall, would get two sequels in 1975. The official one from Bing Crosby Productions, the awkwardly titled Part 2: Walking Tall, which included a new actor playing real-life sheriff and real-life fascist Buford Pusser, the very good Bo Svenson (who would make the role his own), replacing departing star Joe Don Baker. Nowadays Part 2: Walking Tall doesn’t play so bad, but back in its day, its mild PG-rated pulse, when compared to the original film’s hard R impact, pleased few.

Then original Buford Pusser, Joe Don Baker, and original Walking Tall maestro, Phil Karlson, reunited for a Paramount-backed follow-up, the damn good and damn brutal Framed, which would prove to be Karlson’s last film, and one of the best last films made by one of Andrew Sarris’ “expressive esoterica” genre cool kids. Karlson’s two closest colleagues in the seventies still plugging away shooting movies—Robert Aldrich and Don Siegel—wish they exited the stage with a movie as strong as Framed.

These films came out the year before Taxi Driver opened.

Martin Scorsese’s film would open in early 1976.

Later that year, Peter Fonda would be driven Fighting Mad and Bo Svenson would be brought to his Breaking Point.

Kris Kristofferson would lead a Vigilante Force and Jan-Michael Vincent would wage a one-man war against that force in the same movie.

Both Timothy Bottoms and Stephen McHattie would fight back against crooked Southern sheriffs in A Small Town in Texas and Moving Violation.

And Margaux Hemingway would go after her rapist with a high-powered rifle in Lipstick (which is how Stephen McHattie would eventually end his conflict in Moving Violation).

And if the trailer narrator of Death Wish was correct, and Charles Bronson “cleaned up the most violent city in the world,” then it was left up to Franco Nero to clean up the second most violent city in the world—Rome—in Street Law. The narrator of that film would declare, “Franco Nero wields the killing cannon in Street Law! If you can survive on these streets . . . you can survive anywhere!”

In February 1976 Travis Bickle would be compelled to rescue New York child prostitute Iris Steensma from the sexual bondage of her street pimp Sport in Taxi Driver. Three months later—April 1976—Robert Mitchum’s son Jim Mitchum, as Big Jim Calhoun, would travel to Los Angeles to rescue his sister (pretty Karen Lamm) from Hollywood prostitution in Trackdown (like Schrader’s Jake Van Dorn would later do in his Hardcore). Trackdown’s trailer narrator asked audiences, “What would you do if it was your sister?”

When Taxi Driver was first released the film had a higher art pedigree than any of the above movies. It won the Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival, it eventually received four Academy Award nominations, and great reviews from the best critics. Yet Columbia Pictures revealed its real reason for making the picture one year later in 1977. That was when Columbia rereleased Taxi Driver as the lower half of a double feature toplined by a “Revengeamatic” independent pickup titled The Farmer (tagline: “The Farmer doesn’t get mad . . . He gets even!”). Columbia Pictures’ ad campaign insinuated that The Farmer and (the) Taxi Driver’s story and quest were the same. Two stories, about two heroes, who have been pushed too far and decide to do something about it.

This is how I first saw Taxi Driver, on the lower half of a double feature with The Farmer at my favorite grindhouse the Carson Twin Cinema. While I was fascinated by the TV spot for Taxi Driver that played over and over the year it initially was released, I still needed an adult to take me to see the R-rated film. And that year, that didn’t happen. But by 1977 (I was 15) I looked tall enough to get into a lot of R-rated movies on my own (especially if they played at the Carson Twin Cinema). But it wasn’t till this 1977 The Farmer rerelease that Taxi Driver was finally doing what the producers and the studio were so nervous about, playing on a large number of screens in black neighborhoods, in front of black audiences. The year before, in its original release, the film never really made it to the secondary markets—cinemas in the black neighborhoods, discount houses, grindhouses, or drive-ins.

So in ’77, at the Carson Twin Cinema, alongside The Farmer with an (except for me) all-black audience, that’s how I first saw Taxi Driver.

What was our response?

I dug it, they dug it, and as an audience, we dug it.

But it’s safe to say it didn’t play like the subversion of the vigilante action drama that Schrader intended when he wrote the script. In that theatre, with that audience, on a double bill with that other movie, Taxi Driver played like a Death Wish rip-off.

Yeah, the lead guy was more fucked up than the guy in Death Wish, but the guy in Death Wish was pretty fucked up. And in both movies—when the lead guy goes up against the bad guys armed to the teeth—you’re rooting for him.

The first half was way too stretched out for most exploitation audiences. But, while it was slow, it wasn’t boring. And the reason it never grew dull was due to the random moments of street milieu that Scorsese captured.

No film ever made captured the chaos of urban street life in New York in the seventies like Scorsese did in Taxi Driver, and the audience laughed with recognition. The violence, the despair, the grotesquery, and the absurd comedy had never been depicted with such verve and accuracy in a Hollywood picture before. The movie had a realistic vibe that we plugged into because we recognized its authenticity.

The only other time I felt that level of authenticity with the Carson Twin Cinema audience, and the picture that was playing on the screen, was during The Mack.

Before the shoot-’em-up climax, Taxi Driver had a few sections where the audience had a big reaction.

Right from the beginning the audience thought Travis was a fucking nut. They found him ridiculous, and the more the film went on, the more ridiculous he acted, the funnier we found him. But we didn’t think Travis was just a nut, we thought Travis Bickle was a goofball.

His insipid diary entries drew outright guffaws.

When Betsy walks out of the porno movie theatre and leaves Travis alone on the sidewalk talking to himself, the audience busted up laughing—What the fuck did you think was gonna happen, you stupid motherfucker?

When he tipped over his television set and it practically exploded—what an idiot!

When he goes to the record store and buys Betsy the Kris Kristofferson album—You gonna buy it for her? She probably already got it.

And when Travis stormed into Palantine’s campaign headquarters and started acting all crazy, we fell out laughing then too. Especially when he did his little hand-to-hand combat move and made Albert Brooks jump a mile.

For the film’s first half—to us, the audience in the Carson Twin Cinema—it was a comedy about a stupid idiot who’s turning into more and more of a nutter as the story goes on.

I doubt during its Grand Palais screening at the Cannes film festival Taxi Driver induced as many laughs as it did that Saturday afternoon. But in a way, the black audience laughing at Travis Bickle’s antics in Taxi Driver wasn’t that different from that hip Sunset Strip (mostly) white audience at the Tiffany laughing at Peter Boyle’s Joe.

Then the moment happened that made the whole theatre burst into hysterics. That one guy walking down the street, ranting and raving that he’s going to kill his woman (“I’ll kill ’er! I’ll kill that bitch!”). We laughed so hard at that guy, we were a little disconnected from the movie for the next twenty minutes. Because we kept cracking each other up about it. That guy was so funny, we had to make ourselves stop laughing.

What was it about the I’ll kill the bitch guy that cracked our audience up so much? Simple, everybody in the theatre had seen that guy before. I had seen that guy. And when we stepped outside the theatre into the Scottsdale shopping center where the Carson Twin Cinema was located, we might see that guy again. But what really cracked us up was we had never seen that guy in a Hollywood movie.

But the film’s biggest laugh was at the Palantine rally. Scorsese shows us Travis is there by cutting to his shoes in the crowd. Then the camera pans up to him, revealing Travis grinning like a maniac, sporting a Mohawk! When we saw Travis shaved his head like that, the whole theatre burst out laughing. I’m talking hysterically laughing. I’m talking rolling in the aisle laughing—Get a load of this goddamn crazy fool! It was a nice reminder that even though the movie was turning more serious, we were still watching the portrait of an insane idiot. And we laughed through his whole bumbling assassination attempt. Especially the overhead shot as Travis runs away from the secret service, bumping into bystanders. God only knows how many times I’ve seen Taxi Driver, and every time Travis’ Mohawk is revealed—in my head—I hear the Carson Twin Cinema audience’s hilarious reaction.

In the first half of Taxi Driver, it was just the story of a goofy guy going crazy, depicted against a very authentic street/nightlife milieu. When Taxi Driver stopped being a comedy about a goofy guy was when child prostitute Iris Steensma hopped into the back seat of Travis’ cab.

Travis, who says nothing, watches in his rearview mirror as Sport yanks her out of the cab (“Bitch, be cool!”), and tosses that crumbled up twenty-dollar bill onto the front seat (“Cabbie, just forget about this, it’s nothing”).

That crumpled up twenty-dollar bill was such a strong visual image that it sobered up an audience that had grown accustomed to snickering.

From that point on, not only did the audience start taking the film seriously, it also started taking Travis seriously. Which also coincides with Travis taking his weight lifting and gun handling and preparation for God knows what seriously.

That goddamn crumpled up twenty-dollar bill.

From the moment we saw the effect it had on Travis, and we knew what it represented (the money that keeps the girl on the streets, the cheap payoffs that keep her in her place, the one lone fleeting opportunity that Travis could have saved her), we knew—eventually—he would save her. Then, a movie that defined itself by its random incidents suddenly snapped into focus. Suddenly all the random incidents didn’t seem so random. The filmmakers wanted us to know who this guy was before they sent him off on his moral imperative quest for nobility.

Then the movie started playing like a real movie. But frankly, a more real movie than we were used to.

Characters weren’t the normal movie good guys-bad guys.

Travis was a fucking loon.

But in this instance, he might be the man for the job.

When De Niro has his first scene with Keitel’s Sport, it doesn’t go quite like we might have thought. For one, as Pauline Kael pointed out, Keitel’s pimp is surprisingly personable. When he makes jokes at Travis’ expense, we get the jokes, even if Travis doesn’t, and we laugh (my audience loved Keitel’s Sport, and they also loved Steven Prince’s gun salesman, “The Magnum? They use that in Africa for killing elephants!”).

A small thing that makes a big difference is Sport wants Travis to be a satisfied customer (“Go ahead, man, have a good time”). Sport isn’t a monster in a monster movie like the gargoyles in They Call Her One-Eye. He’s a businessman.

Even Jodie Foster’s Iris isn’t the normal exploitation character. For one, she seems much younger during her lunch with Travis than she does in her streetwalker getup. She talks like a real person (Niki, the corresponding character in Schrader’s Hardcore, is entertaining and we like her, but she always sounds like a character in a movie). Despite the life she’s living, Foster’s Iris comes across as naive to the cost. Iris isn’t hopeless, there is still something to be saved.

An interesting change on Schrader’s part when it comes to syncing up Taxi Driver with The Searchers is what sets Travis off on his moral quest to save Iris, as opposed to Ethan’s quest to save Debbie.

Debbie never asks for Ethan or Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) to go on this long journey on her behalf. But—for one fleeting moment of clarity—Iris does. Was it lucky of all the cabs in New York she hopped into Travis’s? Once when Dan Rather was conducting an interview with me, I mentioned early in my career I got lucky. He scoffed at my use of the word “luck.” Declaring, “Some say, what you call ‘luck,’ is when opportunity meets preparation.”

Well, I buy that definition (though I also do believe in Sidney Poitier’s definition of serendipity, “when Providence comes down and kisses you on both cheeks”). Travis had been preparing for some apocalyptic showdown. Some cataclysmic event. A moment of reckoning, or as Big John Milius would call it, Big Wednesday—a moment where Travis can distinguish himself.

And when Iris jumps in his cab, hoping to escape, Travis’ preparation finds opportunity. He’s haunted by that encounter, but so was the audience. Even more than Travis, we in the audience know that was a fleeting moment. We know that when he eventually approaches her, she’ll laugh it off (like she does). She probably won’t even remember it (she doesn’t). She’ll insist she’s fine and there’s nothing to worry about.

But . . . that one moment when she jumped into the back seat of his cab, she was clearly and unmistakably asking someone to save her from these people.

And then it was only a matter of time before Travis would take all his guns and save “Sweet Iris.”

And that’s when Taxi Driver started operating like Death Wish, like Trackdown (which I had already seen), like The Farmer.

Paul Schrader is crystal clear that he’s subverting the Death Wish movie model. In fact, Schrader would have gone far further than Scorsese ultimately did with Travis’ standoff with the pimps. If Schrader had directed the film, he would have surrealistically painted the hallway walls of the fuck hotel with crimson red blood, like in a Kenji Misumi samurai film. Schrader always saw Travis’ last stand as a “samurai death with honor,” that’s why he has Travis try to commit suicide (but his gun is empty). That’s why he always saw the shootout at the climax as Japanese-style surrealism, the splashing red paint against the walls creating an abstraction of the violence. While Martin understood where Paul was coming from, he didn’t comply. When I asked him why not, he humorously snapped back, “Because I’m not Kon Ichikawa, that’s why. I could only stage the scene from a world I knew.”*

Yet, Scorsese also told David Thompson, “I was shocked by the way audiences took the violence [in Taxi Driver]. Previously I’d been surprised by audience reaction to The Wild Bunch, which I saw in a Warner Brothers screening room with a friend and loved. But a week later I took some friends to see it in a theatre and it was as if the violence became an extension of the audience and vice versa.”

“Shocked”?

Really?

You were “shocked”?

So let’s get this straight, a Roger Corman alumnus, Martin “Boxcar Bertha” Scorsese, who came within an inch of directing I Escaped from Devil’s Island, directs one of the most kinetically charged violent climaxes in cinema history . . . and he was “shocked” that audiences were turned on by it?*

No, he wasn’t.

That’s just the kind of horseshit that a director would tell a David Thompson, or a Stephen Farber, or a Charles Champlin, or a Rex Reed, or a Rona Barrett and they’d let them get away with it.

But Scorsese being “shocked” by the audience’s reaction to the climax of Taxi Driver is the kind of horseshit that film directors insincerely mumble when they’ve crafted a tremendously violent and controversial sequence and then find themselves on the hot seat with some interviewer having to answer for it.

They never say cinematic violence is fun.

They never say, I just wanted to end the movie with a bang.

They never say, I wanted to shock the audience out of their movie-trope-fed complacency (Ken Russell might say that, but very few directors who have ever lived had the balls that Ken Russell had).

No, like Peckinpah before him, Scorsese had to bend over backward to disingenuously describe those magnificent exhilarating violent scenes he crafted as horrifying.

I’ve already described how different Taxi Driver was from the other Revengeamatics that screened during that year and the year before that. Its characters, its milieu, its objective, its authorial voice, its literary aspirations.

But where Taxi Driver lined up with Coffy, Fighting Mad, Johnny Firecloud, Trackdown, The “Human” Factor and the other Revengeamatics that unspooled on the Carson Twin Cinema screens was the way the whole film built to a climactic and orgasmic explosion of violence. A climactic explosion—in Scorsese’s hands—that is as brilliant and kinetic as any shootout sequence ever captured on film.

So exactly what was the “shocking” part of the audience’s reaction to Taxi Driver when Scorsese first saw it during its initial release?

Scorsese explained to Thompson, “I saw Taxi Driver once in a theatre, on opening night, and everybody was yelling and screaming at the shootout. When I made it, I didn’t intend to have the audience react with that feeling, YES DO IT! LET’S GO OUT AND KILL!”

Well, maybe they were yelling and screaming because the audience had been led to both that ending and that violent explosion the entire film. And now—at the film’s climax—they reacted like an American movie audience and yelled, screamed, and cheered.

And on opening night of Taxi Driver, a big part of that screaming, yelling, yelping, and even laughing had to do with the audience’s jumping-out-of-their-seats reaction to Scorsese’s graphic gore effects in the final shootout.

Of course they’re rooting for Travis. He’s saving a twelve-year-old girl who’s been put out on the sidewalks of New York to sell her prepubescent pussy to anybody walking by with twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five dollars she’s not even allowed to keep.

Of course we’re rooting for Travis to win his one-man stand against the sleazy pimps, even if he did start it.

If we’re not meant to (at least sorta) root for Travis’ success in his mission, why make Iris a child?

If Iris was nineteen or twenty nothing in the story would be any different. She could still be lost and brainwashed. She could have still had the same moment of clarity. She could have still hopped into Travis’ back seat hoping for rescue. The only thing in the scenario that her not being a child would have changed, would be Travis’ moral imperative and the audience’s perception of that quest.

The structure of most Revengeamatics is the audience is driven mad watching the lead character get fucked in the ass for the first half of the film, and then is brought to climax as the lead character wipes out all the offending fuckers in the film’s final reels.

Now Scorsese monkeys with this structure during Taxi Driver’s first half, but by the film’s last forty minutes—structure-wise—Taxi Driver might as well be Trackdown.

Scorsese has jerked us off so hard throughout the film, now that we’re heading towards the climax, going where the whole movie has always threatened to go, we can’t wait to cum. And when Travis blows Murray Moston’s brains out the back of his head—and they go splat against the wall of Iris’s fuck hotel room—we do.

Which brings me to my rhetorical question to maestro Scorsese:

When you direct one of the most kinetic and outrageously violent action scenes ever contained in a studio-produced motion picture . . . violent catharsis surely must have been one of the filmmaker’s goals, right?

Is Travis Bickle disturbing and troubling?

No doubt.

Yet, as much of a wacko as the movie presents him, neither Schrader, nor Scorsese, nor De Niro go all the way in indicting the character. Steering him far closer to Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey in Death Wish than Peter Boyle’s Joe Curran in Joe.

As opposed to the climax of Taxi Driver—where Travis kills the sex traffickers—during the climax of Joe—when Joe blasts hippies at the commune with automatic weapons—it didn’t turn audiences on.

It wasn’t a great action scene.

It wasn’t intended to be kinetic.

And we weren’t meant to find it cathartic.

Its intention was to be horrifying and ironically tragic.

And that’s how audiences reacted to it.

Also, Joe doesn’t engage in any societal compromises or audience pandering. On the contrary, it flew in the face of compromise and pandering. Joe’s great screenwriter, Norman Wexler, could have given Joe some bullshit backstory in an attempt for the audience to get their bearings on this challenging lead character. But Wexler doesn’t attempt to try and explain Joe or for Joe to explain himself.

Joe is just who he is.

Even Paul Schrader—in regard to Travis Bickle—slightly invests in this type of character Tom Foolery by suggesting Travis is a Vietnam veteran, and that he did a tour of duty during the war.

Horseshit.

No fucking way was Travis in Vietnam.

The extent of Travis’ paranoia of black males is only credible if they are an other that he has only had superficial contact with.

How do you do a tour of duty in Vietnam and only have superficial contact with black dudes? The answer is you can’t.

Okay, say he did serve with black dudes in Vietnam, does that mean he has to like ’em?

No, not necessarily.

But it’s not convincing he would fear them the way Travis does.

In the movie, he fears them as an other. If you serve in war with six or seven black guys (officers and enlisted men) they wouldn’t be an other (unless, possibly, if Travis was an MP).

I don’t have a problem with Travis’ fraudulent claim in the movie.

The only proof the movie offers up of Travis’ military service (no Vietnam flashbacks) is his account to Joe Spinell and his jacket.

Fine, Travis spends the entire movie demonstrating to the audience that he’s an unreliable narrator, completely delusional, and he constantly presents himself to characters in a fraudulent manner (usually to get something he wants at the moment).

He bought the jacket in an Army Navy Store.

Scorsese further clarified to Thompson his intentions in regard to the audience when he was making Taxi Driver: “The idea was to create a violent catharsis, so they’d find themselves saying, YES KILL, and then afterwards realize, OH MY GOD NO.”

Okay, that’s slightly less horseshit.

But . . . if the goal was “OH MY GOD NO,” then show a movie about a man who spends the entire movie speaking about cleaning up the scum of the city, and demonstrate that it’s black males he considers the scum of the city. Then at the climax he kills a bunch of black males because of their defilement of a young white girl and is turned into a hero by the very same city (i.e. white society).

That would have been viewed by audiences as OH MY GOD NO!

And that would have been The Searchers.