Taxi Driver Literary Elements

Martin Scorsese

Robert DeNiro, Cybill Shephard, Jodie Foster

Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks

Neo-Noir, Crime, Drama, Thriller

English

Palm d'Or (Best Picture) 1976 Cannes Film Festival; Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress (Foster) and Best Original Score

February 8, 1976

Julia and Michael Phillips

New York City during the 1976 election season

With very few exceptions, the film is presented either through Travis Bickle's own perspective, or with him as the central protagonist.

A pervasive mood of paranoia and alienation gradually intensifies throughout the film as a reflection of the growing alienation and paranoia of Travis Bickle. The mood is often ominous and foreboding, rarely sunny, humorous, or warm.

Protagonist: Travis Bickle. Antagonist: Matthew ("Sport")

Travis eventually comes into conflict with just about every character he meets, including Betsy, whose rejection of him prompts his withdrawal from society. While Betsy's rejection is an inciting incident, the major conflict does not occur until Travis comes into conflict with Iris's pimp, Sport, and sets about trying to rescue Iris from a career as a prostitute.

The climax is the bloody violence that Travis enacts against Sport and several other low-life figures whom he views as imprisoning Iris in a life of prostitution.

The rain that falls down upon the nightmarish urban landscape (and Travis Bickle's own explicitly addressed call for a more symbolic rain to come along and clean the city up) foreshadows the reaction of society to the act of vigilantism enacted by Travis. He is viewed as having cleaned up New York City.
Additionally, Travis's purchase of a number of firearms is foreshadowed by the cabbies' conversation about self-protection as taxi driver, and Doughboy's offer to put Travis in touch with Easy Andy.

After he is valorized for his rescue of Iris, Travis deflects praise for his actions and resists what he sees as exaggerations of his heroism and the drama of his coma following the event.

Scorsese's camera seems to be in constant motion throughout the film, manifesting itself as an expression of the nervous energy and paranoid anxiety of its main character. Closer examination reveals that the pace at which Scorsese's camera moves actually increases progressively throughout the film, just as Travis's perspective becomes more and more frenetic.

The story of Travis trying to save "an innocent" he views as having been corrupted by low-lifes is a direct allusion to the thematic thrust driving the narrative of The Searchers, a 1950's western in which John Wayne plays a similarly alienated and paternalistic man on a mission to retrieve a young woman abducted by Indians.

The overarching paradox of Taxi Driver is that the almost unprecedented explosion of violence of the film served to make Travis Bickle an iconic symbol of the mentally unstable Vietnam Vet ill-prepared to return to society. Travis is a complicated and paradoxical figure, and his violent acts do not quite match up with his ultimate rescue of a child prostitute.

The most striking example of visual parallelism in Taxi Driver is the contrast and comparison between Betsy and Iris. In addition to the visual parallel that they are both blondes, they also parallel each other by both wearing red when they sit down and spend time with Travis. Thematically, they are parallels of each other because the both represent—at least in the mind of Travis—a pure and innocent damsel who must be rescued from her distress. When Betsy turns out not to be as innocent as he thought, Iris becomes her substitute.