Taxi Driver (1976) is the fifth film by the fantastic Martin Scorsese, who you certainly know thanks to Goodfellas (1990), The Aviator (2004) or The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). The script is written by Paul Schrader, who later collaborated with Scorsese on three other films. Despite being considered one of the best films in the history of cinema, you may not yet have created the courage to watch this daring masterpiece. Here is the plot. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is a war veteran who becomes a taxi driver in New York. Solitary and unstable, he drives by the streets of the city at night, witnessing scenes of violence and sex. This scenery instigates his violent side, which leads him to plot an assassination against a presidential candidate and help a minor prostitute flee.
Taxi Driver and Camus
From the first scene we realize that Travis is an unsatisfied person. The problem is not just the great loneliness that afflicts him, but a constant search for meaning in his life. He explains at the beginning: “The days go on and on. And they don’t end. All my life needed was a sense of some place to go. I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention. I believe that someone should become a person like the other people”. His interest in Betsy can be interpreted, in a certain way, precisely as a search for this meaning. He says he has no interest in politics or music and seems to have no hobbies (other than watching pornographic films at the movie theater), in such a way that his relationship with Betsy seems more of a quest to fill the existential void of his life. Even his attraction to her is explained by the fact that he projects in her the same solitude he sees in himself. When the relationship collapses, he finds himself once more alone: “Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. I cannot get away. I’m God’s lonely man”. All that is left is a world of violence and sex. While his loneliness is expressed by the several shots of Travis in his cab, waiting for the change of the red lights that fill the screen, the hostility of the world around him is manifested in the acid jazz of the soundtrack and in the "cold" settings. His repudiation for this environment seems to increase gradually and it is verbally expressed in the dialog between Travis and his fellow taxi driver, “The Wizard”, in which he states his eagerness to “really do something”. Without being able to find any sense to his life and in search of concrete changes in a world that works according to unacceptable values, Travis decides to act. He says, “Listen, you fuckers, you screw-heads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is someone who stood up”.
How could we explain this kind of behavior assumed by Travis? This is what the Franco-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus (1913 - 1960) defines as “revolt." Let’s hit the road because it's time to go back in the tunnel of time. What is revolt? Camus begins to address the issue in his beautiful work The Myth of Sisyphus in which his famous concept of “absurd” also appears (unfortunately the idea of absurd does not matter here, but do not despair, I will deal with films that address this question in another moment). But it is in The Rebel that he delves deeper into the question. Camus sets out what defines a rebellious attitude and the characteristics that lead man to revolt. The first fact is that the revolt is born of a certain “loss of patience”. The rebel recognizes certain limits that define him as human and decides that they cannot be infringed anymore: "What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion. A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. What does he mean by saying “no”? His no affirms the existence of a borderline. Thus the movement of rebellion is founded simultaneously on the categorical rejection of an intrusion that is considered intolerable and on the confused conviction of an absolute right which, in the rebel's mind, is more precisely the impression that he “has the right to…””(The Rebel). The example quoted is that of the slave who, one day, when he reaches the limit of his suffering, opposes his master and affirms “up to this point yes, beyond it no”. The revolt thus begins with the establishment of what we consider to be essentially human and the decision that this essence should not be violated under any conditions. In the case of the slave, for example, he recognizes that freedom is an essential value to every man, him included. That is why his master no longer has the right to deprive him of this right. Revolt may seem an individualist, selfish act, but in fact the rebel always acts in accordance with the belief that there are universal rights, which must be respected by all. He acts according to what he believes to be a superior and general good, greater than his own destiny and his own life. It is, therefore, an opposition to actions or values that denigrate human dignity. This opposition does not necessarily manifest itself as a political act. On the contrary, the revolt begins just as a personal feeling of outrage and protest against what deteriorates human existence. It is a refusal to be let down by a degrading condition, but this refusal, whether it is a solitary protest or a political manifesto, is motivated by a general sense of injustice. The rebel therefore believes in the “right”, the “good” and the “just” and he rebels precisely because the outside world does not respect these notions, everywhere he sees only injustice and evil. In this sense, unlike the revolutionary, the rebel does not necessarily have a plan or agenda; he simply acts, not letting himself be defeated by the tragic direction in which reality tends to be directed constantly.
Travis Bickle, a rebel
Travis seems to show us traces of what we might call a “Camusian rebellious attitude”. Like Camus's rebel, he also “loses patience” and says “no”. In the case of Travis, the intrusion deemed intolerable is the propagation of what he considers a dirtiness that degrades all human dignity: perversion, violence, prostitution. Travis's behavior is based on a system where there is right and wrong and he decides to act because he can no longer tolerate a world in which what he considers “evil” or trash spreads on all sides and is even literally represented in the sperm and the blood staining the back seat of his cab. From his point of view, Travis acts in favor of what he considers to be a greater good. His actions are not selfish, as we might think, since they aim at what he believes to be the best for all (even though Travis's definition of “all” seems to exclude all minorities, as we shall see). Travis's revolt culminates in one of the final scenes, in which he kills Iris gigolo. Travis's act is purely altruistic at this moment, as he seeks simply to help a girl break free from a degrading situation by putting himself at risk. As Camus points out not every rebel act is political, and this is precisely the case in what concerns Travis’s relationship to Iris. His action is the result of a refusal to accept a reality in which a 12-year-old girl is sexually exploited by a man. In the dialogue with the Wizard especially we notice Travis refusal to resign himself to his reality. He knows that his fate is tragic, which is why he leaves a conscious note of his future death. He also knows that the dirt to which he refers will not be “washed from the streets” by any authority. For this reason he does justice “with his own hands”, killing a robber without great remorse and advising Iris to flee, instead of contacting the police. At the end of the film, a question remains however: to what extent is revolt a positive attitude? Instead of helping Travis to live better and change the reality around him, revolt leads him to a destructive path of pure violence, violence that is always explained as a “mean” that justifies a positive end, a greater good: the “cleaning” of the streets of New York.
As Camus explains, despite being a inherently good feeling that makes us stand up and fight, the revolt does not always lead to positive changes. This happens because there are revolts that arise from the awareness that life has no meaning, there is no God or authority, there is no universal truth that tells us who we are or what is just. This is the kind of revolt Camus calls “nihilistic”, because it is born of disbelief. Faced with the lack of meaning of life, the nihilistic rebel creates a truth for himself and justifies every action with this truth: “With the throne of God being overthrown, the rebel now recognizes that it is up to him to create…this justice, this order, this unity…and, by doing so, to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime if necessary, the empire of man” (The Rebel). The nihilistic rebel acts then according to the precept “the ends justify the means” and he has no modesty in the use of violence if this is necessary for his notion of justice to prevail. That is why Camus considers this kind of revolt destructive. It is by the way precisely by following this type of reasoning that most totalitarian regimes act, committing crimes for the sake of a greater good. Fun fact: it is no coincidence that Camus, although a socialist, stood against the communist totalitarian regime of the former USSR, a position which by the way cost him his friendship with Sartre, who defended the Stalinist regime. We understand thus that Travis is indeed a rebel, but his revolt is nihilistic because his notion of what is good, right, or just is strictly based on the truth that he elaborates for himself according to his prejudiced view of the world. In fact, as we have seen above, the very feeling of revolt is born in Travis because of the apathy of a meaningless life, behavior that is already pronouncedly nihilistic. But after all, is Travis then a hero or just a psychopath? Well, Betsy warned us, “He's a prophet and a pusher. Partly true, partly fiction. A walking contradiction”.
Travis Bickle, the contradictory rebel
Travis does not really seem to be a bad person, especially in his relationship with Iris, with whom he is affectionate and respectful and he decides to help her in spite of all the risks. Travis is, however, quite naive. This trait is clearly perceived in the emblematic scene in which, as he prepares the attack on Palantine, he talks with himself in the mirror, training speeches and poses, as if he were a great hero. The chat scene on the pay phone with Betsy is also a testament to his naivety. His hope in getting her back, after inviting her to a pornographic film – which by the way shows his total lack of synchronicity with the reality in which he lives – becomes humiliating, even for the camera of Scorsese who makes a horizontal tracking shot, dodging Travis almost embarrassed by him. These traits of Travis personality make us empathize with the character. We understand better his motivations and his dissatisfaction with the world around him. But his dissatisfaction is not expressed as a simple realization of what is wrong. Travis treats the others around him with repudiation and arrogance, which we perceive in the racism, misogyny and homophobia manifested in his internal dialogues: “All the animals go out at night. Whores, scum, pussy, buggers, queens, ferries, dopers, junkies…Sick, venal. Someday a roll-way will come and wash this scum off the street”. The violence and prostitution he witnesses are not seen by him as the result of a society that is sick. The prejudice he feels towards African Americans and drug addicts is not perceived by him as consequence of this same “dirty” system that he wants to fight. On the contrary, he judges such individuals as inferior, “the garbage and the trash”, while always referring to himself as a morally superior, with a “very clean conscience” as he states in his first scene. He allows himself to take anyone in his taxi precisely because he sees himself as superior to all of them. Travis becomes thus a real contradiction. His willingness to improve the reality around him is overall good. His soul is heroic. But the values that motivate his intentions are arbitrary. His revolt is limited to a part of the human beings he believes to be worthy of salvation and the “means” he uses are violent and even hypocritical. His actions tend to psychopathy.
It is precisely against this kind of nihilistic revolt expressed by Travis that Camus writes. For the philosopher the true rebel recognizes values that apply to the entire society and tries to defend them for the sake of solidarity, individual freedom and general harmony: “If men cannot refer to a common value, recognized by all as existing in each one, then man is incomprehensible to man” (The Rebel). This recognition happens when the rebel realizes that “we are all in the same boat”, we all live without knowing what the meaning of our existence is and we are all tragically destined to live with that doubt. The revolt of each of us regarding the tragedy of existence is what unifies us: “I rebel—therefore we exist”, proclaims Camus. The revolt will not give us an answer to what life is, but it helps us establish rights that guarantee the dignity of all, constituting therefore a more harmonious existence. That is why the true revolt is incompatible with violence, because to defend the freedom of all is also to defend the fact that we have no right to take away the freedom and the life of the other: “The freedom which he demands he claims for everybody; that which he rejects he forbids all others to exercise. He is not simply a slave opposing his master but a man opposing the world of master and slave” (The Rebel). At the end, the rebel does not revolt against another human, but against a situation that is unjust and inhuman. The slave’s revolt is not against the master, but against the “master / slave” relationship perpetuated by the society in which he lives.
Taxi Driver is a masterpiece because Scorsese manages to make the public feel empathy for a psychopathic hero, no matter how much we rationally do not want to indulge such sympathy. Travis is the typical naive “good citizen” that we all know. He refuses to accept the degrading reality that surrounds him and acts to defend what he believes to be right. But as much as he aims at a “general good”, he limits the term “general” only to individuals who meet the requirements of what he defines as “good”. When this “good citizen” uses psychopathic means in defense of his truth, he becomes exactly what he rejects. Travis revolts against a dirty world, but paradoxically to cleanse this world he still fouls it even more of blood, not realizing that like the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the homossexuals and African Americans he judges, he also becomes a victim of a system that prevents their individuals to live in more humane conditions and that instigates their violence. Thus, on the one hand we identify with Travis because, as Camus explains, the feeling of revolt that motivates him is something human and fundamentally good. We all understand the frustration of living in an unjust world. But on the other hand the actions that result from Travis' revolt are bad because they do not take into account human existence as a whole. Eliminating every man who acts unworthily does not make reality “less dirty”. Not only because this action creates even more “dirt”. But mainly because this dead man is also determined by this same “dirty reality” that we try to clean. He is certainly a victim, like all of us, of a reality that also deprives him of certain essential rights (which does not justify his wrong actions, but explains their origin). Travis's mistake is to believe that his revolt is worth more than the life of any other man; after all we are all part of the same tragic existence. Killing another man in the name of a notion of “good” which is arbitrary and partial becomes a hypocritical attitude. And yet, let's be honest, in this regard we all have a bit of Travis in us. His exaltation as a hero at the end of the film serves us precisely as an alert to our tendency to revolt nihilistically, as Camus criticizes, putting our concept of “good” above others and rarely acting according to what is good for all. We tend to consider every revolt as necessarily noble, which is why part of us wants to see Travis as a great hero who saved a 12-year-old girl from prostitution. But to what extent can the result of his revolt be seen as positive if the means used for that purpose disregards the existence of other humans? A revolt that fights for human dignity but neglects the dignity of certain humans is contradictory. It is necessary to revolt and say with Travis “here is someone who stood up”. But may this revolt not be stained by the drops of another man's blood, like those falling from Travis's finger.