Josh Spiegel
Few filmmakers are as well-known and misunderstood as Martin Scorsese. There are only a handful of living directors who are recognizable on a last-name basis to even the most casual moviegoer. Yet many people, including some purported cinephiles, perceive Scorsese as a director who a) deals in making Mob movies and b) depicts violent or otherwise disturbing acts in a way that implicitly endorses those acts. Though Scorsese had already directed a few early classics by 1976, it was that year’s Taxi Driver (which turns 50 this week) that kickstarted his status as both an auteur and a hotbed of misplaced controversy.
The story of the mentally disturbed Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) and his descent into a kind of modern Hell in NYC is partially known now as the inspiration for a would-be presidential assassin who was obsessed with De Niro’s co-star, a pre-teen Jodie Foster. The intense debate that has surrounded the film since its release sprung up in part because of its ambiguous ending. The young man who’s been so off-putting to a would-be paramour, and acts as if he’s going to war when facing off against an amoral pimp, ends up celebrated for saving a young girl and gets fanfare in the media. (This, in spite of Scorsese acknowledging in the film’s LaserDisc commentary that Bickle is a “ticking time bomb” waiting to go off.) No matter what Scorsese or screenwriter Paul Schrader have said, plenty of people take the end of the film as an embrace of the angry-young-man trope at a time in American history when disaffected men turned to violence as a vicious escape.
A clear modern comparison is the gleefully unpleasant and obnoxiously self-satisfied Todd Phillips film Joker, not just because De Niro shows up again (now as an elder-statesman talk-show host, riffing on another Scorsese film, The King of Comedy). There, too, we see a grim depiction of the big city as filtered through the eyes of a mentally unstable man who resorts to violence to ensure he can be heard by those in power. Joker was greeted in theaters by massive box-office success and hosannas for star Joaquin Phoenix, who got an Oscar that was woefully dated as soon as his name was read off the envelope. While it owes a great debt to Taxi Driver, that film’s depiction leans much more heavily towards endorsement, but with far less thought afforded to what it means to support a Bickle-esque figure. It’s the kind of film those critical of Scorsese envision the elder statesman’s work to be – incurious and smug and faux-daring.
“Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets” is one of the most famous lines in Taxi Driver, and seems about as straightforward a mission statement for Travis Bickle as you can find. Moreover, it’s the kind of line that seems pretty uncomfortable to read, let alone hear. So the notion that people have glommed onto this character (either to lionize the fictional man or to feel Scorsese is lionizing him) is as fascinating as it is wrongheaded. As is the case with many of his films, this is not a story of celebration; it’s a document of how horrifyingly many of the people populating the country’s urban center are bereft of a soul.
If there is any truth to the notion that Scorsese’s depictions of violence feel like he supports them, it’s simply a commentary on his immense skill as a filmmaker. To make the lead characters of films like Taxi Driver, GoodFellas, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Departed seem appealing instead of terrifying is no easy task. But arguably few of Scorsese’s protagonists or the films they occupy are appealing on paper. In some twisted way, his stories have often tapped into the zeitgeist in ways that should make us uncomfortable, less at what Scorsese is accomplishing and more at what it says about the American spirit. The story of Travis Bickle is a discomfiting affair, because young men like him have always existed, often hiding in plain sight.
Media literacy is a skill that must be practiced and honed, and one that people often fail when they approach the work of Martin Scorsese. He has undeniably made it a linchpin of his filmography to present the darker side of American history as filtered through many of its most powerful figures. Taxi Driver is about one of the less powerful men floating through New York in one of its darkest decades, attempting to demonstrate the power he can wield when given the right weaponry. That he is briefly treated as a hero says as much about who we are as a country as it does about how lucky Travis Bickle is for briefly targeting his hatred at someone worse than him. That people look at films like Taxi Driver (as well as other entries in Martin Scorsese’s expansive filmography) as documents of endorsement is a commentary on us, not on the man himself.
“Taxi Driver” is available for digital rental or purchase.
