Any media text, and perhaps in particular film, is a product of the time and culture in which it was produced. This may sound like something of an obvious statement to make, but when Martin Scorsese directed and Paul Schrader wrote Taxi Driver, they were responding to the society around them and the way in which they perceived and interacted with this society. This is reflected in their creation of the character of Travis Bickle, whose view of the world is the whole basis of Taxi Driver.

When the film was made in 1976, America and American cinema were in a state of change. The Vietnam war had ended the previous year with the ignominious defeat and subsequent withdrawal of the American forces stationed there. The country was approaching in two hundredth anniversary as an independent entity and Hollywood, although it did celebrate Americana with films such as Rocky (which beat Taxi Driver to the best picture Oscar), was also looking back and around with a kind of gloomy introspection.

“The whole film is very much based on the impressions I have as a result of growing up in New York and living in the city,” Scorsese later said when discussing Taxi Driver. It is therefore interesting that Travis, the central character, is not from that city at all but from the mid-west of the USA, and is thus seeing New York from the perspective of an outsider. Travis however is not merely an outsider to New York; he is an outsider to society at large, which is why the film’s portrayal of that society is so interesting.

The first time that the audience meets Travis properly and is given a view of the world in which he lives is in the scene where he first applies for the job as a taxi driver. We are given a small but important glimpse, in his conversation with the taxi boss, of one of the most relevant under classes in American society at that time, and even to some extent today; the Vietnam veteran.

Unlike those soldiers who fought in the first two world wars and other conflicts, the men who returned from Vietnam were not welcomes as heroes but metaphorically swept under the carpet by the establishment; regrettable relics from a war that they with they had never become involved with in the first place.

Nevertheless, being produced as it was only one year after the end of the conflict, Taxi Driver somewhat predates the Hollywood back-lash of vehemently anti-Vietnam movies such as Born on the Fourth of July. Indeed, the film’s writer Paul Schrader has even gone so far as to deny that Vietnam was an important influence at all: “it’s not meant to be a story about Vietnam and Vietnam is never discussed,” he later stated.

Nevertheless, as Vietnam is so often mentioned as a theme of the film, it does go to show that the movie was able to tap into an undercurrent of American society that had strong feelings regarding the conflict. The fact that Travis is given a job by the taxi boss seemingly because he is also a veteran and there is some kind of unspoken comradeship between them could be a silent nod to the horrors experienced in the war and one veteran’s understanding of another feelings. This is perhaps the way in which Scorsese, if not Schrader, portrays Vietnam; as some unspoken and unacknowledged influence on the lives of those who were involved in it.

Another social group that is dealt with subtly within the film is black people, with the subject of racism being dealt with more as a subtext than with any overt reference or symbolism. Nevertheless, there are several instances where it put across quite plainly that Travis is something of a racist and despises black people, regarding them as part of the “scum” he sees it as his God-given mission to clean up from the streets.

The first instance of this is when Travis is in the café with the other taxi drivers quite early on in the film. There is nothing overt about this sequence, but the way in which it is shot and Travis’s despising look towards the black men sitting on the other side of the café tells us all that we need to know about his character.

Racism is perhaps the only characteristic that Travis shares with the rest of society, as throughout the film little incidents suggest to us that racial tension is rife throughout the city, suggesting that the blacks are not a well-regarded social group in New York, or at least not in the side of the city that Schrader and Scorsese wished to portray in Taxi Driver.

One such racial incident comes in the scene featuring Scorsese himself as a somewhat bizarre passenger in the back of Travis’s cab. This man is following his wife who is having an affair, which the man seems all the more disgusted at because she is having an affair with a black man. Travis remains eerily quiet during this scene, yet at no point does he disagree with a man and it almost seems as if he is listening with a kind of disturbed interest.

Perhaps the most obvious portrayal of racism comes in the scene where Travis commits his first on-screen murder, shooting down the young black boy who was trying to rob the convenience store. True, this was hardly a sympathetic character, but the way Travis suddenly and swiftly acts, without even thinking about it, followed by the store owner’s brutal beating of the mortally wounded youth shows a degree of racism from both characters that only confirms our view, from this film, that New York is a city with a large racist population.

It is fairly well-known that Scorsese wanted to take this portrayal of racism one step further and make the pimp character Sport a black man as well, but it was decided that this may blur the line between the film portraying racism and actually being racist in itself. Schrader later said that too keep the character black, as he was in the original screenplay, would have been “incendiary.” Thus Sport is in fact one of America’s other most downtrodden ethnic minorities, a native American, or an ‘Indian’ to use the popular vernacular.

There is not a great deal shown as to how Travis feels about Sport’s ethnicity, as it is difficult to determine whether the obvious contempt the taxi driver has for him is because of his ethnic origins or the very fact that he is a pimp. Travis’ opinion of prostitution is obvious – the whole prostitution business is part of the “scum” he sees it as his job to clean up from the city.

Thus he takes it upon himself to ‘rescue’ the young prostitute Iris from Sport. This is despite the fact that she seems, if not happy, then at least content with her life with Sport. His affection for her in return is displayed in one of the few scenes of the film not shown from Travis’ own perspective, when Sport and Iris are dancing slowly together in her apartment. This is a bond that Travis refuses to recognise, perhaps showing just how skewed his vision of life is, and instead he determines to return Iris to the ‘safety’ of her family unit.

Perhaps one of the film’s most iconoclastic themes is the manner in which it portrays the ideology of American family life, the supposed ‘perfect’ scenario of a happy husband and their bright, happy children being seen nowhere in the movie. Travis is estranged from his family, and there must be some reason why Iris was desperate enough to run away from her home in the mid-west and come to New York at such a young age. Iris’s father writes to thank Travis for the return of their daughter, but we are left to wonder, just how thankful is Iris herself?

The depiction of women in the whole film is somewhat of opposites; the two main female characters, Iris and Betsy, are almost polar opposites, so it is difficult to say that the film portrays women in one way as a group. However, both Betsy and Iris do represent different sectors for American society: Betsy representing the hard working, archetypal ‘good woman’, the type who in years to come will marry a nice, respectable man and settle down in suburbia with two children and a god, making apple pie to her heart’s content.

Iris, however, represent that very antitheses of the ‘American dream’, if not revelling in then certainly not rebelling against the underbelly of society. She has no wish to return home, no real wish to escape from her life as a prostitute, in short she holds none of what the establishment would have us believe are the common ideals of the American people.

This intriguing portrayal of opposites in the two female characters is perhaps intended to represent the two differing social climates in which they grew up. Betsy, the older of the two by a decade, is a member of the post war generation, filled with hope and optimism and faith in American society. Iris however, at only twelve years of age, is intriguingly roughly the same age as the Vietnam war, and a child of a more cynical and jaded phase of American history.

This cynicism also comes through with the film’s portrayal of authority figures. The presidential candidate, Palantine, at first seems sympathetic to Travis’ rants about the scum in the city when he is in his cab, but it is clear that he in fact becomes concerned by the virulent attitude of the taxi driver. The secret service agents who surround him fade into the role of blank-faced oppressors behind their sunglasses, the unapproachable side of society.

Politics, however, does not interest Travis, only making a name for himself does, and in this respect he is akin to some twisted version of the American dream; to be somebody. The ultimate goal of American society is to be an achiever, a somebody, and Travis seeks to do this first by assassinating Palantine, which of course fails, and then by rescuing Iris, although this is far more of a personal crusade for him and the resultant ‘hero’ status merely a coincidence. It is clear that he enjoys it though, by the way in which the news clippings are cut out and placed on the wall of his apartment.

Overall then, although Taxi Driver is primarily a film about the personal life and view of American society, Schrader and Scorsese use this to give reflections on their own view and observations of American life. Perhaps it is Travis himself who represents the key social group shown in the film, that of the outcast. Years later, Schrader recalled how after President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded in a failed assassination attempt, his first thought was that it was “one of those Taxi Driver kids,” and sure enough the FBI came to see him that day to ask if the attempted assassin had contacted him at all.

Taxi Driver then is a film that gives us a cross-section view of American society, from high-ranking politicians down to street prostitutes, all through the eyes of the ultimate outsider, “god’s lonely man,” Travis Bickle, who is perhaps part of the biggest social group of all. A contradiction of sorts, yes, but merely one in a film that is filled with so many.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age