Taxi Driver Research

Peter Biskind's 'Easy Riders, Raging Bulls':
'Scorsese absorbed the filming-on-the-fly flavour of the new cinema vert movement pioneered by Donn Pennebakbr and Ricky Leacock that was going on around him. The slice-of-life influence would show up in his student films, then in Woodstock, and later in the grittiness of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.' page 228
"No other film has dramatized urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, its horrifyingly funny and then just horrifying." page 119

 (Notes from) Taxi Driver Analysis - Part 1: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=8se9Zxy1Njo

• Martin Scorsese's first attempt at a mainstream major motion picture just happened to become one of the most revered pieces of American Cinema and to ring the zeitgeist immediately upon its release.
• After making Mean Streets, Scorsese finally got the opportunity to adapt the screenplay written by Paul Schrader and collaborate once again with his future filmic partner Robert De Niro, but this time on a much more introspective and lurid journey.
• "I don't think people anticipated that the therapeutic writings of a twenty-something dealing with inner-city solitude would hit such a nerve with the audience"
• What was originally thought of as a very personal story, may have just arrived at the right time.
• Taxi Driver is a film that deals with loneliness, obsession, self-hatred and the need to be belong.
• I think the themes of this film become more evident once they become amplified by Travis's downward spiral.
• Even though the film follows a single character whose characteristics are on the extreme end of the spectrum, the experience as a whole can still be seen as a relatable one. This is because all of the emotions that make up Travis are all of the emotions that we, the audience have to deal with.
• We are his existential complex, his yearning to be included, we just don't admit it. Or perhaps we're more like Travis than we thought, in that we don't want to admit it.
• Taxi Driver (I believe), is a story which is more about the essential aspects of the human condition, rather than just an entertaining glimpse into the mind of a mad-man. Because as the film shows us, we all have the capacity to become Travis. It just a matter of whether we want to be.

Taxi driver is possibly influenced by The catcher in the Rye:

Similarly to Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, Holden's attitude remains unchanged at the story's end, implying no maturation, thus differentiating the novel from young adult fiction. 
 

Taxi Driver Analysis by Xanatos:

"Roger Ebert, an avid fan of the film once said that the one part of the famous mirror scene that never gets quoted is: "well I'm the only one here". And that is the line that perfectly describes Travis: He's simply a loner that can't deal with his emotions who has a tendency to lash out in anger and frustration. All the while being driven to madness by urban decay as he witnesses it by the streets of New York. Only true loneliness can be depicted when the protagonist is surrounded by people everywhere he goes. Taxi Driver draws parallels to The Searchers, in which the protagonist tries to save someone who doesn't necessarily want to be saved. However the difference between The Searchers and Taxi driver is that Travis does so for his ego, not because its the best thing to do. His violent actions in the final scene are likely to have psychologically scarred Iris, counterproductive to supposedly "saving" her."

Is the Travis a hero or a villain?: http://rateyourmusic.com/board_message/message_id_is_4509004
He's an antihero. The character has good intentions but no regard for society and its standards.
Right. Keep in mind that right before he kills the criminals, he tries to shoot the guy who's running for president, but gets spotted by Secret Service. His killings are less a heroic rescue than an outcry of rage against a world that disgusts him (remember that he tries to kill himself immediately afterwards but has run out of bullets). The ending is ironic; he's celebrated as a hero because his fury happened to target rather despicable people, but had he been successful with his first attempt, he would have been considered a villain by the very same who celebrated him. Scorsese said the last shot of his eyes in the rear view mirror is meant to convey that his impulses are not "cured," and it's possible he may strike again.


Taxi Driver Essay: http://www.nitrateonline.com/ftaxi.html

• Overthinking as a result of isolation from others can lead to convincing yourself of a lie to be true. That we see the world through our own perspectives that do not mirror the reality; as shown by the contrast of the type of people the audience do not see through Travis' viewpoint, compared to those we see through his viewpoint. People, generally young men who at the time felt loneliness, obsession, self-hatred and the need to be belong. The outcast within us all. Even though the film follows a single character whose characteristics are on the extreme end of the spectrum, the experience as a whole can still be seen as a relatable one. This is because all of the emotions that make up Travis are all of the emotions that we, the audience have to deal with.
• Below this narrative surface, Taxi Driver eloquently addresses the massive social and political changes that had taken place in the post-World War Two era; more specifically, the film addressed the consequences of these changes. Foremost among them was the decay of the inner-city core, the result of waves of suburban "immigration" by middle-class whites, seeking not only more property but "relief" from the taxation "pressures" of having to support ghetto regions populated almost exclusively by minorities. Since the 60s had been scarred by the Vietnam War and three assassinations, the contexts in Taxi Driver were, at the time of the film's original release, like newly-opened wounds in American society. American society seemed to be on the verge of collapse, and the life of Travis Bickle seemed to capture the frustrations of an entire group of Americans who felt not only alienated, but powerless to stop the collapse. Much of Taxi Driver centers around Bickle's desire to stop feeling isolated. But it isn't only Vietnam that has isolated him; his most essential problem stems from the shortage of options available to him on a professional basis. When the subject of education comes up in his interview with the cab company, his reply is vague. "Here and there...", he admits sheepishly, before his voice trails off. What makes the film so prescient as a historical document is the fact that many of the issues it raised are still relevant; more depressing has been American society's inability to rectify these situations twenty years later.
• Unfortunately, as Taxi Driver so obviously demonstrates, Travis may not be the only victim of the effects of the war, although he certainly seems to be the one most sensitized to them. When Travis tries desperately to connect on some elemental level with his society, he discovers that it is as disconnected as he is. Even worse, and unlike Travis, society seems to be acting as a parody of itself, paying only lip-service to the values it claims to uphold. In perhaps one of the most striking scenes in Taxi Driver (in a film which is never less than striking on a thematic and/or visual level at any time), Travis, under the influence of his temporary psychosis, asks the question, "You talkin' to me?" The phrase often elicits laughter in an audience, because the phrase is so familiar to the cinematic cognoscenti; however, this familiar laughter often contains within it a sense of unease. Travis' question is relevant, because, despite his best efforts, everyone has been talking at him, not to him. All of his passengers, regardless of socio-economic position, have been and are perfunctorily engaged in life; their dialogues with Travis indicate that their aim is not communication (with the central aim of comprehending another's point of view) but rather to have a Greek chorus parrot approval of their opinions. Mutual understanding is, at best, irrelevant. This situation is made most relevant in Travis' discussion with the presidential candidate, Palantine. Palantine asks Travis for his opinion, but doesn't want to hear that the solution is to clean up the streets; not only would such a solution be too difficult to achieve, but it would take an unequivocal ideology to achieve, something which would be politically suicidal. It is easier to brush off Travis's concerns with vague promises interpreted by Travis as indifference. Given the number of socially-unsatisfying encounters that Travis has in his taxi, in all areas of the city, the taxi rides act as symbolic microcosms of the dissolution of American society. Under the circumstances, Travis' vigilante turn is not surprising; how can he value a society that does not even value itself?

Taxi Driver Context: http://www.sparknotes.com/film/taxidriver/context.h

• Director Martin Scorsese was born in New York City to Italian immigrant parents in 1942. 
• He grew up in an observant Catholic family in Little Italy, and at a young age he wanted to be a priest. His dreams soon changed, however, and he attended New York University film school. 
• After film school, Scorsese moved west to Hollywood. 
• Roger Corman, a pulp movie director and producer, hired him to direct Boxcar Bertha in 1972. 
• Scorsese's first collaboration with Robert De Niro, who plays Travis in Taxi Driver, was on Mean Streets (1974), a film about Catholic Italian-Americans in Little Italy that was rooted in Scorsese's own childhood experiences. 
• The next film Scorsese directed was Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, for which Ellen Burstyn won a Best Actress Academy Award, the same year that Robert De Niro won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II. These Academy Awards helped Scorsese raise the funds to make Taxi Driver in 1976. 
• The film received huge critical acclaim, cementing Scorsese's reputation as a major director. 
• In addition to Taxi Driver, Scorsese has directed over twenty-five films, including the documentary Italianamerican (1974), the highly controversial The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and, more recently, the popular Goodfellas (1990) and Gangs of New York(2002)
• Taxi Driver elevated Scorsese's status as a director, and it assured Paul Schrader's reputation as a major screenwriter. 
• In the mid-1970s, Schrader was an up-and-coming screenwriter whose first screenplay, The Yakuza (1975), was considered a success even though the film had not performed well financially. 
• Taxi Driver's success bolstered Schrader's career and ensured his place in the Hollywood community. 
• Although some scenes in Taxi Driver were influenced by the actors, the film follows Schrader's screenplay closely, more so than Scorsese has followed his other films' screenplays. 
• Many of Schrader's later screenplays deal, like Taxi Driver, with one man's loneliness and alienation, including American Gigolo (1990) and the more recent Bringing Out the Dead (1999), which is in many ways an update and homage to Taxi Driver. 
• Like Scorsese, Schrader grew up in a religious household. 
• He did not see a film until his late teens, so his influences are more literary than cinematic. 
• While writing Taxi Driver, he was under the spell of existentialist novels such as Albert Camus's The Stranger and earlier portraits of loneliness such as Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. 
• Scorsese made Taxi Driver in the mid-1970s, a decade famous for its diverse and innovative films. 
• The 1970s produced a group of directors, sometimes called the "film school brats," that included Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Brian de Palma. These men were young Americans who had studied European filmmakers at film school, and they were also the first generation of filmmakers to have grown up watching television. 
• Their movies feature close attention to technical detail, while demonstrating an encyclopedic knowledge of film and television history. 
• At the same time, their films were not just art house pictures but huge box office successes, funded by Hollywood.
• The fall of the Hollywood studio system at the end of the 1950s, combined with the various political upheavals of the 1960s, including the sexual revolution, the anti-Vietnam movement, and the civil rights movement, made predicting the public's taste increasingly difficult. 
• During the early 1970s the largest studios lost over $500million. 
• They knew their methods of attracting audiences, which included using big name stars, making high-budget musicals, and releasing films based on popular novels, had become outdated. 
• Studios became open to giving money to young and unknown directors who could make more original and risky movies.
• Taxi Driver centre's on a racist, sociopathic, and violent protagonist and features a twelve-year-old prostitute, but at the time of its release it was a popular, well-received film. 
• The movie was critically acclaimed in the United States, received four Oscar nominations, and did even better financially in Europe.
• Taxi Driver immortalizes New York City in the 1970s, a city vastly different from the New York we know today. 
• The city's filth is exaggerated in the film partly because it is seen through Travis Bickle's skewed perspective, but during 1975, when the movie was filmed, New York was literally a filthy city. 
• New York nearly filed for bankruptcy in 1974, so when the New York City trash collectors went on strike in the summer of 1975, causing the streets to fill with warm garbage, the city didn't have the funds to fix the problem. 
• One of the promises Jimmy Carter made when campaigning for the presidency, which he won in 1976, was that he would make sure New York City wouldn't have to file for bankruptcy. 
• Taxi Driver presents a true-to-life portrait of what Manhattan once was. Times Square was filled with peep shows and prostitutes, and during the summer of 1975, when the film takes place, the country was in the middle of a presidential campaign where one of the main issues was moving beyond the Vietnam War, which had officially ended only in 1973. 
• We can easily imagine an ex-marine in New York being disgusted by the filth, finding the politicians who are supposed to help him to be artificial, and feeling that he needs to approach the city as he would a special combat mission.