Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver, American neo-noir film, released in 1976, that was directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Paul Schrader. It is considered one of the greatest and most controversial films in history. Set in New York City, it follows a Vietnam War veteran who works as a taxi driver and becomes obsessed with societal decay and the “filth” of the city. Featuring a chilling performance by Robert De Niro as the rage-filled antihero Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver is a haunting portrait of loneliness and one man’s descent into paranoia and violence.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

Plot and characters

Travis Bickle is a former U.S. Marine who lives alone in New York City. Struggling with chronic insomnia, he takes a job as a taxi driver in an effort to fill his sleepless nights. Travis serves as the film’s narrator, making for an almost entirely subjective perspective. As he voices his erratic thoughts, it quickly becomes apparent that he feels as if the world, as represented by New York, is corrupt and broken. Feeling alienated from society, Travis spends much of his free time alone in his small apartment or patronizing pornographic movie theaters.

Soon Travis encounters Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a beautiful woman who works as an aide on the presidential campaign of Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris). Besotted, Travis asks her out for coffee, telling her that he thinks she is a lonely person. During their date, an intrigued Betsy tells Travis that she has never met anyone quite like him. Betsy agrees to see a movie with him, but the movie that he takes her to turns out to be a pornographic one, and Betsy storms out of the theater. Later she refuses his entreaties to give him another chance when he calls her on the phone. (In a famous shot, the camera moves away from Travis as he speaks to Betsy on a pay phone, focusing instead on a long, empty hallway. The camera move has been interpreted as signaling an important shift in Travis’s mental state.) After she returns the flowers that he sent her, he shows up at her work and angrily tells her that she will “die in a hell like the rest of them.”

Meanwhile, Travis prowls the city in his cab, picking up fares and ruminating on what he calls the “scum” of New York’s street life. A seemingly random but momentous event occurs when a young sex worker (Jodie Foster) bursts into his cab one night in a panic and begs him to start driving. Before Travis can ascertain the problem, the girl is violently pulled from the cab by a man—her pimp—who throws money at Travis and tells him to forget the incident and drive away. Travis becomes obsessed with the girl, encountering her again another night when he nearly hits her with his cab as she crosses the street. When she walks away and eventually picks up a customer, Travis’s preoccupation with the amorality of life and his own alienation deepens. Among his despairing thoughts is the admission: “Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores. Everywhere. There’s no escape.”

A serious change in Travis’s behavior is evident when he starts preparing himself mentally and physically for some kind of violent confrontation, buying several guns and fixating on Palantine. He follows Palantine’s press conferences and attends his rallies, earning the suspicion of the attendant Secret Service agents when he tries to engage one of them in a bizarre, aimless conversation. Alone in his apartment, he makes contraptions to wear on his body to more quickly brandish a concealed weapon. As he descends into rage, he practices drawing his guns while standing in front of a mirror, at one point repeating the question, “You talkin’ to me?” to an imaginary adversary. Soon after this disturbing scene, Travis interrupts a robbery in a convenience store and shoots the offender, killing him. Surreally, the store owner thanks Travis, who then goes on his way.

Travis encounters the young girl from the streets again, learning that she is only 12 and a half years old and that her name is Iris. He tries to befriend and save her from her life with Sport (Harvey Keitel), the pimp who earlier had pulled her from Travis’s cab. Despite his efforts to convince Iris to leave New York and go back to her parents, she returns to Sport. Seemingly, this is a turning point for Travis. Suddenly sporting a mohawk haircut, Travis shows up with a concealed gun at another one of Palantine’s rallies, but he is spotted by the Secret Service and forced to flee. Next, after traveling to the brothel where Iris lives and works, Travis confronts Sport outside and shoots him, wounding him. Entering the brothel, Travis encounters two other men involved in trafficking Iris. In the ensuing exchange of gunfire, Travis kills Sport and the two men, one of them right in front of a horrified Iris. Travis then tries to shoot himself, but he has run out of bullets. Seriously wounded, Travis sits on Iris’s couch while she crouches in the corner in terror. When the police arrive, he simply smiles and pretends to shoot himself in the head with his fingers. The camera then travels slowly over all the bloodshed.

The film then jumps ahead in time, revealing that Travis is being celebrated as a hero for having saved young Iris, allowing her to return to her grateful family. In the final scene, Travis is back at work when Betsy gets into his cab one night. By all appearances, she now admires him, telling him that she read about him in the newspapers. In the rearview mirror, however, a flash of paranoia in Travis’s eyes suggests that his mental health has not improved. This final moment leaves his ultimate fate unclear.

Background and production

Taxi Driver was part of a wave of films in the 1970s about urban vigilantes, such as Dirty Harry (1971), starring Clint Eastwood, and Death Wish (1974), starring Charles Bronson. However, the film’s writer, Paul Schrader, has said that he drew inspiration from a dark period in his life after his divorce. His other influences included the published diaries of real-life political assassins and John Ford’s classic western The Searchers (1956). In Ford’s film, John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a man who becomes obsessed with rescuing his niece from the Comanches who have kidnapped her. Yet Ethan’s racism against Native Americans is so extreme that he suggests that he may kill his niece as soon as he finds her. In Taxi Driver, although Iris’s pimp is white, Travis Bickle shows a particular antipathy toward African Americans, and his racism is portrayed as another dangerous element of his troubled psychological state.

The film was made in New York during a heat wave and a garbage worker’s strike; both events lent themselves well to the city’s representation as a place gone to seed. It also marks the second collaboration between Robert De Niro and director Martin Scorsese, after 1973’s Mean Streets, which also starred Harvey Keitel, who had appeared in several of Scorsese’s early films. The casting of 12-year-old child star Jodie Foster as Iris was a sensitive matter, because of concerns over whether she would become traumatized by working on a film with such dark themes. Before production, Foster was required to undergo psychological testing to ensure that she was fit for such an experience. Foster’s older sister was used as a stand-in for Iris’s more provocative scenes.

After the film’s completion, it was threatened with an X rating by the Motion Picture Association of America because of the graphic violence during the climax. To secure an R rating, Scorsese muted the film’s color scheme so that the blood in that scene would appear a darker shade of red. Meanwhile, its evocative and ominous score, by Bernard Herrmann, became the composer’s final piece of music; he died one day after finishing it.

Reactions and social commentary

Taxi Driver shocked both audiences and critics when it was released. Hailed for its powerful performances, harrowing script, and neon-lit cinematography, the film exposed viewers to previously unexplored issues of mental illness and loneliness, urbanization and crime, and morality. In the decades after its release, the film would also spark conversations about post-traumatic stress disorder experienced by war veterans, toxic masculinity, gun violence and mass shootings, and the incel subculture. In a 1976 review in The New Yorker, film critic Pauline Kael described Travis Bickle as “an outsider in New York—a man who can’t find any point of entry into human society,” and asserted that “no other film has ever dramatized urban indifference so powerfully.”

The film’s ending, in which Travis is hailed as a hero and wins Betsy’s admiration, proved to be another point of controversy. Many critics have interpreted it as a fantasy, though Kael is said to have taken its ending at face value and cried “He’s still out there!” after her first viewing. An especially dark footnote in the film’s history is its supposed influence on John Hinckley, Jr., who developed an obsession with both the movie and Foster and attempted to assassinate U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1981 in a bid to impress the young actress. (Hinckley was ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity.)

Taxi Driver won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 1976. It received four Academy Award nominations, including for best picture. Astonishingly, Scorsese was not nominated for his directing, though De Niro and Foster both received acting nominations. Bernard Herrmann was nominated, posthumously, for best original score.

The film appears on many lists of cinema’s greatest movies, including the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American films of all time. In 1994 Taxi Driver was added to the National Film Registry, a film preservation program established by the U.S. Library of Congress that selects films of cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.