The Miraculous Manu Memorial Movie Month, Mmmmm!

Taxi Driver (1976)

Musical Accompaniment: Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five — The Message

Travis Bickle is a sick, pathetic man, a hypocrite ("walking contradiction," really) whose proclamations that "one day a real rain will come and wash away the scum" contradicts the fact that he revels in it — like, can you imagine Travis Bickle enjoying clean, country living, or even Rudy Giuliani's New York City? Like the movie itself, he is a mix of fascinated and repulsed by the city at night. (I can't deny the appeal myself, on a visual level at least. Very neo-noir — wait wait, NEON noir.)

For instance, early on there's a short scene where a girl (12 and a half years old!) hops in the back seat and implores him to drive, just drive anywhere, to get her out of a horrible situation, and he does nothing to actually clean up the city, just sits there until the split-second moral decision has passed out of his hands and into her pimp's. This moment does haunt him for the rest of the movie, in the form of the crumpled $20 her pimp tosses Travis through the passenger's side window, and glances at her on crosswalks and street corners.

One motif I loved keeping track of in this movie was its evolving use of the color red and, to a lesser extent, yellow. It kicks off in one of the first images we see (besides the credits), red lights (possibly of the stopping variety) passing over the eyes of Bickle:

At this point it really doesn't mean anything other than making a good image to hook us, combining with the music to create a sense of foreboding. Then, Travis eyes a young, blonde (that is to say, yellow-haired) woman dressed in white (virginal, holy white) and becomes lightly obsessed with her. Finally, when he works up the courage to ask her out on a date, her place of work is decked out in all red, he's wearing a red jacket, and her only non-white outfit in the entire movie is a mix of red and white:

Perhaps this red symbolizes love, now, the color of hearts and Valentine's Day cards. (Amusingly, throughout this scene, the coworker his sweetheart/target has been wittily flirting with for two scenes before this keeps inserting himself into the middle of the frame, between Travis on the right and the woman on the right, culminating in him peeking out from behind a pillar like a cartoon character:)

For his second date, Travis, betraying his monologues about how he despises the filthiness of the city, takes his date, his angel, to a fucking PORNO and thinks that's acceptable. I mean, it was the 70s, but come on.

(See the man with the red jacket like Travis' drumming? No idea what to make of that. He was the star of a whole establishing shot sequence, too.)

The frame floods with the red of the theater seats, drowning her and bringing her to storm out:

(The movie poster for the movie they're watching is even red and yellow!)

Finally, she catches a yellow taxi out of the movie:

This is our first act break, and after this the motif practically disappears.

With his object of desire having rejected him, Travis' thoughts turn ever darker, and he wraps himself up in a self-absorbed fantasy (something he also decries in the early parts of the film) of himself as his OWN angel, a masculine, righteous avenger — a "real cowboy" — but comes across, the whole time, as a boy playing at a man. See here, him aping a Secret Service agent:

The conceit is laughable and paper-thin, and retroactively makes the times I've seen the "You lookin' at me?" scene quoted to ACTUALLY sound like a tough type hilarious. This leads to maybe my favorite scene in the whole movie:

Note how the framing probably deliberately mirrors when Travis got dumped, earlier, and the red is so powerful it even takes the yellow away from the taxi. Because of this cue, the immediately preceding scene where a cuckold passenger outlined his plan to kill his wife to Travis, and the scene in act I where this man implored Travis to buy himself a piece for protection, we know almost exactly what's on Travis' mind, even though he never actually gets around to saying it because he's too nervous and awkward. The closest he gets is he says he's been having some "bad thoughts." The scene here works entirely on implication, small cues that the audience was meant to pick up on, and its meaning comes out clear as day. I love it. The other cabbie, not being the omniscient audience, though, doesn't quite catch his drift and thinks he's just going to kill himself. He gets a gun for him anyway, one that's "not a toy."

After this, the motif disappears for a while and red stops being an overwhelming color. Travis starts actually being the change he wants to see in the world, as opposed to earlier when he was a passive observer to the ills of the world, the underaged and unwilling hookers, but, again, he's acting out childish fantasies of masculinity, like when he shoots an aspiring grocery-store stick-up artist, the ultimate gun fantasy. It's practically the definition of doing the right things (debatedly) for the wrong reason.

He projects all the virtue he tied up in the previous blonde with the other blonde in the movie, the aforementioned 12-and-a-half-year old hooker Iris, which is quite the direct invocation of the old Madonna/Whore complex. Indeed, where Travis and the previous woman were persistently placed in the left and right sides of the frame in scenes with each other, the relationship is literally mirrored for he and Iris, perhaps because this time around Travis sees himself as the more virtuous one. And the red motif returns after its long absence, too:

But this time, it seems to symbolize that he is descending into the bowels of Hell itself.

Only when his plan to assassinate the presidential candidate that his previous focus worked full-time volunteering for falls through, does he go to take down her pimp and associates once and for all in a spree of violent frustration, illustrating where his priorities truly lie. Red finds one last potent association: blood.

After this, he becomes hailed by the public as a hero for slaughtering these gangsters and reunites with his object of adoration — though I like to think he's matured past the stage in his life where he needs an angel or needs to be an angel, or is, at least, sated. That's probably just what I'm reading into the ending, though, you could back up a thesis that he didn't learn his lesson just as well — after all, what feedback did he ever get from the world that this was not an attitude to continue indulging?

Overall, a very very good movie, and I liked it a lot.