Inside the Mind of a Lonely Man
Taxi Driver is an extended close-up of
Travis Bickle, its protagonist, and our proximity to him reveals
his loneliness. The camera abandons Travis's point of view only
twice, once during the scene between Betsy and Tom in the campaign
office near the beginning of the film, and again during the scene
between Iris and Sport near the end. Travis watches one of these
scenes, but only from afar, in his taxi. He can't hear what the
other characters say, but he is involved as a voyeur. By keeping
us close to Travis at all times, Scorsese lets us see through his
eyes, though we never gain a thorough understanding of who Travis
really is. In the diner where Travis relaxes with his cabbie coworkers,
the camera is rarely where we would expect it to be. Instead of
focusing on the conversation, it lingers on two well-dressed black
men for a long time. Travis perceives himself to be surrounded by
threatening black men in the diner, yet later in the scene, when
the camera shows the whole diner, we see that the tables are filled
with innocuous people of many races. When the camera acts as Travis's
eyes, we have see the world as he does, and we learn something about
Travis in the process. In the same diner scene, Travis drops an
Alka-Seltzer into a glass of water, and his gaze lingers again.
The camera zooms in until all we can see are the bubbles. Travis's
attention is again in the wrong place. We are not likely to share
Travis's fascinations, but Scorsese obligates us to partake of them
temporarily.
The intimacy with Travis that Scorsese forces upon us
wouldn't be so successful if Travis weren't to some extent sympathetic. Taxi Driver is,
after all, a film about a fundamentally unlikable character. Travis
is a racist, murderous, mentally unstable, socially incapable, insomniac
war veteran with a deranged hero complex. Yet our intimate view
of Travis prevents us from discounting him. We're so close to him
that we can feel his embarrassments, paranoia, infatuations, and,
most important, his loneliness, as if they were our own. We may
not agree with his feelings, and his actions are often surprising
and disgusting, but Travis possesses a fundamental loneliness that
every human being experiences at some point.
Travis views himself as "God's lonely man," yet the point
of "God's Lonely Man," an essay by Thomas Wolfe from which Schrader
took this phrase, is that loneliness is a trait that all men possess,
even if each man believes his feelings are original and unique.
Travis's loneliness, combined with his charisma, makes him fascinating.
Travis's racism and violent actions are not endearing, but we can
sympathize with his loneliness and with his early attempts to integrate
with society. When Travis first asks Betsy on a date, he succeeds
at playing the charming young man. His later smiles may seem hysterical
or maniacal, but when he walks right up to Betsy's desk and smiles,
he is charming. We want him to succeed with Betsy, and we are just
as surprised as Betsy is when Travis takes her to a porn film. Like
Betsy, we were wrong to believe Travis was innocuous and sympathetic.
Travis lives on the extreme outskirts of what is acceptable, but
because we know him so intimately, we can sympathize with him even
when his actions are unforgivable.
