Fifty years on, the anti-hero of “Taxi Driver” is eerily familiar

Yes, we’re talkin’ to him, or at least about him. Fifty years after “Taxi Driver” was released in February 1976, Martin Scorsese’s sleazy masterpiece—a morality tale with a sketchy moral—routinely ranks among the greatest ever films. It is chiefly revered for two characterisations: of Travis Bickle, the deranged cabbie-turned-vigilante played by Robert De Niro, and of New York. One has held up better than the other.

Subway crime, berserk prices, rats: today’s New York suffers a range of urban blights. Watching “Taxi Driver” puts them in perspective. There was a sanitation strike in the summer of 1975, when the film was shot, and it shows. Unemployment and the murder rate were soaring; the population was shrinking. Municipal bankruptcy loomed.

“All the animals come out at night,” Travis says in his noirish voice-over. His New York is overrun by drunks, druggies, strippers, child prostitutes and stick-up artists. As with Dostoyevsky’s novels, several of which share Mr Scorsese’s theme of child abuse, you can’t turn away, but feel like scrubbing yourself clean when the story ends. After Travis slays three low-lifes in the gory climax, the camera surveys the carnage from above, as if passing divine judgment. Everything was worse in the 1970s, you may conclude—except for the movies.

On screen, as in reality, New York contains multitudes: it is an abode of moonstruck lovers and greed-is-good financiers, hustlers and mafiosi, ghosts and their busters. Yet for many film buffs “Taxi Driver”, set in a neon-lit cesspit of vice and decay, is the supreme New York movie. Watch it closely, though, and it is less a portrait of a place than of Travis’s febrile perception, refracted through his rain-slicked windscreen and crumbling mind. The shimmery surface of the metropolis is a mirror. Probably great cities always are.

And the character it reflects is all too contemporary. Travis is a damaged Vietnam veteran, but his neuroses and contradictions are familiar in the atomised 21st century. Like lots of would-be moral reformers down the ages, he is transfixed by what reviles him. He loathes the Gomorrah of the East Village and Times Square but hangs out in porno cinemas. “Here’s a man who would not take it any more,” Travis declares. The “it” is partly himself.

Above all, he’s a loner. The yellow carapace of his taxi is a symbol of his isolation. It’s as if there is a secret to communicating that no one has told him. He wants to make friends and court women but doesn’t know how. One of the shocks in a film replete with them is a lateish mention of his parents. Travis has seemed so irredeemably alone.

As it does for some misfits today, politics offers a jolt of power for his ego and a sheen of virtue for his rage against “filth and scum”. The identity of the politician he fixes on hardly matters, nor whether Travis supports or (as he plots to) assassinates him. Racism and misogyny are outlets, too. “You’re like the rest of them,” he tells a woman who bolts when he takes her to see a skin flick. In 2026 Travis would find consolation in alt-right chatboards and incel forums.

In the end, he seeks redemption in violence. His most loving relationship is an all-American romance with his guns. He buffs his scarred torso for action like an acolyte of the body-conscious manosphere, dressing for his rampage as if for the wedding he can never have. As for too many mass shooters of the past 50 years, murder seems his only means to get the world’s attention.

The cosmic joke is that it does. In Mr De Niro’s coruscating performance, Travis’s anguish appeals to viewers’ sympathies while his prejudice and bloodlust repel them. Just as his killing spree finally forfeits them, society takes him at his own estimation: his is the righteous kind of violence, the press decides, and Travis is a hero. Posterity has made a similar mistake with “Taxi Driver”, replacing alarm with admiration. “You talkin’ to me?” is an immortal line, parroted as a slogan of macho bristle. In fact, it is spoken by a psychotic to his own reflection in a slumland bedsit.

As they gawk at skyscrapers, hail yellow cabs like Travis’s or watch steam rise from manhole covers, outsiders in New York often feel they’re in a movie. So does Travis. He thinks his is a Western or gangster film, but in a way his genre is horror. At least as much now as in 1976, he embodies something real and close that you may prefer not to see. “Well I’m the only one here,” he tells the mirror in that famous riff. He is still here—and he is far from the only one. ■