Taxi Driver: A Study of Loneliness

I first saw Taxi Driver when I was eighteen years old, and I remember it quite vividly. I was, like most of the world at that time, under lockdown for the coronavirus pandemic – and to put it lightly, I was bored. Every day had begun to look the same, and I was lucky if I made it out of the house to just take a walk around the neighborhood. I would have done just about anything to pass the time, so when I found a Martin Scorsese flick I hadn’t yet seen, I turned it on with a small amount of hesitation. (The hesitation came from not knowing much of the movie/not knowing if it would be my thing; the decision to watch it anyway was a mixture of boredom and a deep love for 70s era Robert De Niro, the latter of which stemmed from an earlier viewing of The Godfather part II.)

But, despite my initial reservations, I was fascinated from the moment the movie began. When I reached the halfway point, I stopped and started it over just to rewatch everything I had seen so far. One of the only things I had known about the movie before starting it was that the character of Travis Bickle doubled as the protagonist and antagonist of the story; and the thing that surprised me the most, as I was sucked further into the plot, was how much of myself I saw in him. How I identified with his loneliness, his seclusion from the world. Perhaps, in part, this feeling was intensified because I watched it during the nationwide lockdown, a time of isolation that worsened my pre-existing depression. However I experienced it, and whatever the reason behind the experience was, Taxi Driver is, I believe, a story about loneliness – where it exists, how it exists, and how it affects the life of someone who is predisposed to fall into it headfirst.

Despite living in one of the country’s most populated cities – and not to mention the fact that, as a cab driver, he’s almost constantly surrounded by people – Travis is an individual who feels isolated from everyone around him. He willingly works overtime, driving passengers to destinations far from his assigned routes, because he has nothing else to do. He lives in a shabby, broken-down apartment, where there’s little but an old TV and a refrigerator stocked with junk food and beer. He was in Vietnam, but he’s since left the military for unknown reasons. He suffers from crippling insomnia and seems to have no one to talk to. In a monlogue covering the many hours spent driving his taxi into the night, he expresses himself to the audience. “Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere,” he says. “In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man.”

These words – which I recognized as closely resembling something I had written in my own journal months before, during an episode of severe melancholy – tell us everything we really need to know about Travis. He feels that isolation is his destiny. If there was a time he didn’t feel this loneliness, it’s been gone for a long while, and to reach that point again seems impossible.

But, despite any allegiance we might feel to Travis, it’s impossible to deny that there’s something bubbling beneath the surface. He’s likable and polite, but he’s strange. There’s something in him that leaves the audience, and other characters in the story, on edge. It’s almost imperceptible sometimes – just hanging in the background of moments where he flounders in conversation, or shakes someone’s hand for just a second too long, or, most disturbingly, harvests a strange fascination with a local campaign worker. But it’s always there, begging for someone to notice it. Anyone watching can tell that Travis is a ticking time bomb; the question is not if he will explode, but how much damage will be caused when he does.

The extent of his lostness is seen suddenly, exceedingly, in a way I didn’t expect. Although things appear to start looking up – he takes time off work, exercises rigorously, eats full meals, and gets more sleep – we discover that he hasn’t taken up these new hobbies from a change of heart. He’s training himself, getting ready for an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate. I remember, in some unexplainable way, feeling completely and utterly betrayed when this turn of events came about. I

suppose it’s a sign of indelible directing on Scorsese’s part to make someone feel as though they’ve been swept under the rug by a fictional character, and if that was his goal, he certainly achieved it. After all, Travis’s character flaws haven’t been hidden from us. We’ve seen him become obsessed with a woman he barely knows, and threaten her when she doesn’t reciprocate his feelings. We’ve watched him listen to every word of a stranger’s plan to commit a horrible crime, seemingly looking for Travis to try and talk him out of it, and he never says a word. Travis has been showing us who he is from the start. I just wasn’t looking in the right places.

Still, though, his humanity doesn’t completely go underway. In fact, I found myself on the verge of falling under his spell once again when he takes it upon himself to help Iris, the underage prostitute who tries to escape her drugged-out pimp in Travis’s taxi one night. After this single encounter, Travis tracks down the brothel where Iris works, and spends the last segment of the movie determined to get her out of the city and back to her parents. In the timespan of an hour and a half, he’s transitioned from antihero to villain and back to antihero, as he proves to be the only voice of reason in this precarious situation. One can’t help but wonder if Travis sees a small bit of himself in Iris – a person corrupted by the immorality of the world, someone who could flourish if they were only given the chance – and think that this is why he so desires to help her. Because maybe in some small way, by helping her, he could be helping himself.

Which leads into the end of the film, a finale that’s been debated upon for nearly half a century. Some think that the ending plays out exactly the way it’s portrayed; others believe that Travis is killed in the shootout in the brothel, and that the final scene is only his dying vision of how he wanted his life to end up. Personally, I find myself leaning toward the second option, because the first just seems too wonderfully convenient considering what we’ve learned in the story thus far. For one thing, it’s hard to forget how Travis has spent most of the movie desiring to be seen as a hero – to be remembered for the good things he’s done, however few they might be, instead of the bad. In the end, we see his wall covered in newspaper clippings that describe him as the hero he’s always wanted to be, for murdering gangsters in a brothel and saving the life of a young girl. There’s never a mention of any trial, or even any questions he’s had to answer, for taking multiple lives. He was also spotted by multiple Secret Service Agents for his suspicious behavior while planning his assassination attempt, yet despite all his pictures in the papers, he hasn’t been identified by one of them. He was injured multiple times in the shootout, but seems perfectly able in the final scene. He’s approached by Betsy, the campaign worker he obsessed over earlier in the film, despite the fact that she was visibly terrified of him the last time they saw each other; and he drives away instead of reciprocating her obvious flirtation, as though he’s been somehow completely healed of his volatility and insecurities. Most poignantly, he receives a letter from Iris’s parents, thanking him for saving their daughter and sending her back home – but, according to the small bit of insight we previously gained into Iris’s background, she didn’t seem to have much of a home to go back to.

Both the movie and its starring character hold so many nuances that it’s almost impossible to break them all down in one article; but one of Travis’s most glaringly noticeable traits lies in the way he blames the corruption of the city he lives in, and the basic immorality of the world, for his masochistic actions. He never stops to take a look on the inside, peeking inwards to see where the real problem lies. Maybe it’s because he lacks the self-awareness to do so. Or maybe it’s because he’s afraid of what he might find. That being said, I’m not sure I’ve ever found an antagonist to be quite as powerfully empathetic as the one in Taxi Driver. In some ways, Travis Bickle represents the average lunatic you might find walking the streets; in others, he represents the part of all of us no one wants to acknowledge. The part that is subject to loneliness, and to dark, sleepless nights. The part that wonders if we are worth more than the things that hurt us. The part that might crack when pushed too hard, even when it doesn’t want to – and sometimes, oftentimes, when it does.