Taxi Driver Review (Archive)

26:54That's not my apartment. It's one of the best, most disturbing scenes in the film. And of course, noir was on my mind this week as we are going to talk about this gun for higher later in the show, and obviously Taxi Driver is indebted to noir, but it occurred to me that that entire sequence could almost be its own film. That's its own noir playing out, right? With the cuckolded husband and the man she's up there with and that whole illicit affair. So I found that fascinating. I always find that fascinating. The silhouetted figures, right? Exactly, right? In the shadow there, right? It definitely makes sense.

27:32But did you also catch, because I didn't catch this apparently back in 2011 that Scorsese, I think, has two cameos in the film. Yeah. The first time we see Betsy, we notice him leering at her before we notice her, which is saying something because Sybil Shepard is just dazzling in this movie. I mean, she's very funny, very quick as well in terms of her performances, but just such a dazzling contrast to the grime of life we otherwise get. So I was going to get into the score and some more of the filmmaking stuff, but as we're talking about the cast and how good some of the supporting players are, I mean, coming off just rewatching Silence of the Lambs, it's pretty striking to see for me how fully formed as an actress Jodie Foster was even at that age, because that's also a remarkable performance.

28:20Like there is an ease to that performance and an intellect to it, which you talked about in relation to Clarice that comes through that has nothing to do with sort of childlike precociousness. It's just not there in Foster's performance, and it's so good. So what are you going to do about supporting that old bastard? When? When you leave.

28:46I don't know, just leave him, I guess. You're just going to leave? Yeah, they've got plenty of other girls. Yeah, but you just can't do that. What are you going to do? What do you want me to do, call the cops? Well, the cops don't do nothing, you know that. hey look sport never treated me bad i mean he didn't beat me up or anything like that once but you can't allow him to do the same to the girls she's so self-possessed um the scene of the two of them in the diner you know talking about why she's why she's chosen this life as much as she's had a choice um yeah and what 12 or 13 when filming this so um again we can talk about you know, how, is that such a great thing as, as good as she is in the movie, you know, that you would, um, you would want someone at that age in this, in this sort of part, but, uh, certainly Foster had the talent, um, to pull it off.

29:37It's, it's an incredible performance. Yeah, it really is. Now the Bernard Herrmann score, the dissonance of the grimy sleazy New York that we see and the, The corruption of probably multiple characters, but certainly of Bickle in his own mind against the often lushness of that old Hollywood orchestration. It really is so startling and often jarring. And maybe it goes back to what Schrader was saying, that on some level, this really is a movie just about a man and his romantic problems. or it could be about Scorsese and it's its own kind of twisted love letter to New York City in some way but I really think it's that that ironic contrast which also takes us maybe we're not ready to get there yet but to the end of the film and why I don't see it as a fantasy but I'll talk here instead about the cinematography I mentioned and Michael Chapman those eerie sickly greens really stood out to me this time as he drives the streets of New York City.

30:43And even from the very beginning in the credits where you get that blurry effect where it's almost like an impressionist canvas in a movie that is, like most noirs, actually very expressionistic. But there's just this sense from the very beginning that there's going to be a complete distortion of reality with regard to how Travis perceives the world, including these fantasies where he sees himself as the romantic lead, you know, when he's out with Betsy, for example, and we get that score that kicks in. You mentioned the camera move when we see is the Mohawk for the first time. It comes through that distortion of reality in all of the mirror shots of Travis, the reflections, the sudden camera pans.

31:26Again, there's a real intent here to jar the audience. You know, I'd never noticed this before either, but he mentions pretty early on that the rain is going to come and wash all this scum out. And not too long after, Scorsese draws our attention as he's driving to a fire hydrant shooting water over the street. And as he's about to approach it, he has the wherewithal to roll up his window and to not get sprayed by it. As if somehow he's not going to be baptized by the street, if you will, or maybe this stand-in for the rain, the water, isn't going to get him. He's exempt from the rain in some way, depending on your reading of it.

32:06But it's notable that while he might not get sprayed, his car does. And then the view out his windshield, Scorsese lingers on as he's looking at those New York City streets. And it takes a while for all that rain to go away and the blurriness to go away. That's that's the entire film and Travis's view of the world in a nutshell. Yeah, it's the most impressionistic shot is when the water is rolling off the windshield and you see those lights. And as you talk about the green in Chapman Cinematography, and also I would say the red glow that we get in so many neon signs. It's almost like those signs, which the movie associates a couple of times with porn marquee, porn theater marquee.

32:47It's like they've bled into the atmosphere somehow. And it's not just the signs giving off that light anymore. it's everything and that's maybe how it feels in Travis's head it's very different than uh not too long ago we discussed Paris Texas the Vin Vendors film and the the beauty of the neon signs in that movie it's there is beauty there's a crispness and a clearness and a sharpness to it and here Chapman takes the same material and gives it a luridness and an infectiousness that carries over into the entire rest of the film. And I would also say about the Herman score, yeah, as you're describing it, it's like a split personality score, isn't it?

33:32Because we have these sexy, mournful saxophones, which would be very much of the period. It's very 70s. And then that's Travis's fantasy. And then we get our reality, the viewer's reality, which is where you hear those threatening suspense chords that are reminiscent of some of Herman's work for Hitchcock. It was interesting, the day after I watched this, I put on, I just chose Psycho. And maybe another Herman score is more reminiscent of Taxi Driver, what we get here. But man, was there a lot of similarities there in listening to those back to back. We just get this, yeah, it's old Hollywood instrumentation, but also the threatening suspense nature of it.

34:16So we've talked about Schrader, mentioned Schrader a couple of times. There's one thing about the script that I really want to highlight, which I just think is so clever and has a lot of thematic resonance to you. And it's the trail of the$20 bill. and this is the bill that Harvey Keitel's Sport throws at Travis to get him to leave when he yanks Iris out of the cab the first time that he encounters Sport I think and it lands on his seat he looks at it with disgust because he's this is the first time he started to entertain these ideas of saving Iris right she gets yanked out of the cab he leaves it there crumpled on the seat till he gets to the garage at night and then pauses and then kind of shoves it in his pocket we see that bill again, I think three times later, I think he, he almost pays for something once, but doesn't use it.

35:09He uses different cash. Still, it's crumpled up at the coffee shop. He owes a guy some money, five bucks. So we see him pull that out next to the other cash he has. And then the last time we see it is when he rents the room with Iris, where he thinks he's going to convince her to leave. He's got to pay this guy to rent the room and he slams it in the guy's hand. And running through all those make it seem like this really obvious, heavy-handed symbol. But maybe it is in the script, but the way Scorsese kind of just lightly makes space for those moments makes it incredibly, incredibly effective.

35:43And yeah, I was just curious if that was in the original script and if the versions I saw online are true. It was. I think that's a great touch. Well, it is a great touch and it is subtle enough that I probably missed. I'm pretty sure I missed at least one of the times you mentioned, and it's not something I'd paid any attention to before on previous viewings. And yet this time when he leaves it on the chair, you see how he considers the money in a close up when it's thrown in in the first place. And then when he gets back and he parks the cab, he has to make that decision. And as a symbol of, again, kind of his own corruption, but his sense of moral superiority that he's going to take that money.

36:23But of course, he also sort of maybe, and this would be fitting for Schrader, it's almost like a cross he bears, right? It's that he's going to keep that$20 bill because it's going to be the reminder to him of what he's not. It's his token. What he hopes to not be. Yeah, it's his token in that way. I agree. It's a great screenwriting touch. So Dana and I did talk about the ending in 2011, and it turns out my thoughts about it haven't really changed since then. In short, there is a reading of the film that suggests maybe everything that happens after the bloodbath is a fantasy. and there's different evidence people point to, including the overhead shot, which is almost like a view from heaven.

37:09It's been suggested there near the end. And then the fact that everything that happens, and this I totally agree with, everything that happens after the police show up seems somehow a little bit tacked on, false, or maybe like a fantasy. You certainly see it in that exchange with Sybil Shepard when she gets in the cab. And that's something where it's definitely not clear from watching it that we are supposed to completely believe that she ever got in the car. There's something about the shot, reverse shot of him looking at her and us only seeing her in the rearview mirror. It's almost, again, like it's his perception.

37:46He's projecting her there in the backseat. That all said, where do you fall on that theory, Josh? So I think this takes us back to Chris Christopherson, actually, in that conversation, because one other question that we've touched on lightly, but is why did Betsy ever even agree to go get that cup of coffee with this guy? And so that's already kind of planting the seed of how much of his interaction with her is he imagining? Now, the movie toys with us because she gives him a reason and thereby gives us a reason. She says she's interested. She's intrigued by his contradictions. And that's what makes her think of the Christopherson song, The Pilgrim, chapter 33.

38:26So we could tell ourselves that, okay, she's curious. But I really think not everything, but a vast majority of what we see between Travis and Betsy is some sort of fantasy. And think of what he tells her in that conversation. He says he could tell she wasn't a happy person when he watched her talk to Albert Brooks. but we've been given and i forgot how many scenes we got between brooks and shepherd we get like a fair amount of them and every time we get one of them they seem to be pretty happy they have a rapport they're flirty they're like giving it back and forth to each other his distorted view of the world he's a threat so he perceives those exactly exactly so why you know she is she seems to be a happy person.

39:15So right. It's his distorted perception. Now, I don't think everything after the massacre is a fantasy. And this takes us to the top of our conversation. I think there's a very, there's some interesting commentary in the fact that Travis is celebrated as the hero. And I think it's more revelatory. We're living with that now, right? With the media distortion of things makes it extra resonant today. But I do think that her getting in the cab is fantasy. And here's why. And it's a very brief filmmaking touch. It's partly the look in the rearview mirror that you talked about, where she seems like she's in this dream space.

39:56It's almost like we're not in the cab anymore, but we're into this portal to another dimension, how the mirror frames her. But if you notice, there's a really weird moment. He drops her off on this leafy tree line, nice street, her home, we presume, and pulls away, watches her in the rear view mirror. And all of a sudden he does a double take. The sound on the soundtrack actually distorts. It's almost like a record scratch. And he looks back in the mirror and the immediate next thing we see is not her leafy green street, but it's the neon soaked grimy streets that he usually drives down. And so I think that's the transition of he was just imagining that he was with another woman in another place.

40:39And in reality, he's right back where he had been at the beginning of the film. Yeah. So I think we're completely aligned. If you're suggesting that maybe some of the sequences with Shepard even earlier were fantasy, potentially, is that what you're saying? I would say his experience of it or, you know, the way the way it's being presented is the way he's sort of seeing it. Well, again, I'm completely aligned with him seeing the world completely differently than everyone else around him, including the people he's sitting across from. And I agree with you. I think that we're supposed to read that entire exchange in the cab at the end with Sybil Shepard as a fantasy.

41:17But that doesn't mean everything that happens at the end is a fantasy. I do reject that. And I reject it, one, for the reason you said, which is there is a beautiful, profound irony in the way he is celebrated, which again comes back to this idea of the perception of reality, because it's very easy to just put what he did and to frame it the way the media does, which is, you know, vigilante rescues, rescues girl and kills a pimp. You know, if you just look at it that way and you don't see what we saw or you don't know a little bit more about the situation and how disturbed Travis is, it's very easy to buy that narrative.

41:59Even the narrative that Iris's parents are probably selling to themselves, right, and isn't completely true about how she's assimilated back home and, boy, she's been rescued. It's all tied up in this idea that the world misperceives what Travis did. Travis now sees himself falsely as a hero and this idea of kind of a collective bloodlust where as Americans we all go well damn right they had it coming so he did the right thing. If it's all a fantasy then that commentary is completely watered down and what else is watered down is the moment you spoke to at the end which is that amazing punch of the the grabbing of the review mirror I think right and the jarringness of it.

42:41And all of a sudden we're back to a certain reality. And I think that certain reality is coming back from the fantasy that he was just engaged in with Sybil Shepard in his backseat. But it's also this reality that any progress somehow that Travis seems to have made. This idea that maybe by committing this act and being the Avenger has somehow now set him right with the world and he's no longer going to be a threat to society. We know in that moment with that cut and with the sound that that's not true, that Travis is still disturbed as he's ever been. And do you think maybe even like the letter from Mr.

43:24Steensma from Iris's father, which seems to be kind of like a practice run for Schrader's Hardcore? Because I think that came a few years later and had a similar plot about a father going after his runaway daughter. But I wonder if even that is imagined because just because of the detail of the father making so many excuses about how we can't come out to see you. Like we we don't have any more money. And it's almost like he's inventing these reasons why these people won't actually interact with him because maybe they don't exist. Well, we saw earlier him writing a note that was mostly a fabrication to his parents.

44:00So I wouldn't put it past him to fabricate that letter paying tribute to him as a hero either. For more on our 7 from 76 Best Your Ever series, including previous and future reviews, visit filmspotting.net slash 7 from 76. People do anything in front of a taxi driver. I mean anything. People too cheap to rent a hotel room. Don't drive a hurry up, will you? People want to embarrass you. It's like you're not even there. It's like, you know, like a taxi driver doesn't even exist. A scene there from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, a movie that was part of one of my favorite Best Picture crops ever in 1976, along with Network and All the President's Men and Rocky, which did win the Oscar.

44:43And I love Rocky, don't get me wrong, but I'd rank it probably fourth behind those other three movies. There were no wins for Taxi Driver despite four nominations for Best Picture, obviously, supporting actress for Jodie Foster as the 12-year-old prostitute Iris, for score and for best actor for Robert De Niro in one of his most memorable roles ever as Travis Bickle, the disillusioned lonely Vietnam vet who watches, quote, all the animals come out at night from the seat of his cab and hopes that someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. In honor of Taxi Driver's 35th anniversary and the Blu-ray release coming out this Tuesday, AMC Theaters had screenings across the country on March 19th and March 22nd.

45:21Dana, we both caught it on the big screen. It was the first time I'd seen it in more than 15 years, so I almost felt like I was watching it for the first time. I know from listening to your Slate Spoiler Special podcast that you had a similar reaction to it. And our always erudite and often contrarian film spotting producer Sam Van Halgren also got a night out and saw the re-release, which prompted some chatter between us over email. I hope he won't mind that I'm going to poach the question he posed to me and pose it to you now, because I think it's a really good one. He acknowledges that De Niro is beyond brilliant as Bickel, and he gets why it's so beloved.

45:54But he ultimately wonders what makes this a great film today as opposed to in its day. How do you answer that? Ah, so his argument was that it's locked into the mid-70s, that it's of its time and it feels dated now. Yeah, that's a big part of it. I disagree, but I don't really have an argument except to say that I just don't feel that watching the movie. I felt that it was incredibly topical and alive. And I had that feeling that you feel when you watch a great work of art and say, wow, this says something new to me now than it did when I first saw it. Yeah, I agree. I think that in its grittiness and its style and that sense of alienation that just pervades the whole film, there's no doubt it's a 1970s American film and a 1970s New York film.

46:29You probably know this a lot better than I do. That Times Square just doesn't exist anymore. A lot of those scenes that we see of him walking or in his cab late at night. But I do think it's a great film today. I'm with you because it does seem timeless to me as well. It's still very audacious cinematically, especially in how it depicts violence. I think that still shocks you a little bit. And I think that the politics of the movie are largely secondary to this very vivid portrait of paints of loneliness. I think that the senator who's running for president, Palatine, his speeches are really full of kind of the same bland rhetoric we hear today.

47:01It's sort of universal. And I think that, sadly, there probably are a lot of Travis Bickles out there. In some ways, there may be even more dangerous because I was thinking about it. You know, Travis's enemy, if he has one, he thinks he has a lot of them, but it's really just himself. He's more self-destructive than anything. You see how he eats and how he lives. But there isn't one group of people that he can pinpoint as the cause of his miserable life. He doesn't hate even Palatine, the guy he plans to kill, because he just really doesn't have any conviction about that one way or another. I think he's caught up in a more general malaise, this kind of intangible malaise, which is also what makes it so frustrating.

47:36It makes it so you have such this sense of futility that you can't pinpoint. And I think that today, one of the things that struck me, we're so divided culturally and politically that the Bickles out there can probably more easily find a target to try and take down. I think about Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona. Yeah. I mean, I think that's another thing that makes this movie, again, to answer Sam's question, that makes it still vibrant now is that in 1976, when it was made, it was a prophecy, right? It was a prophetic kind of film. And now it's actually happened multiple times over. It's just weird to think that this movie was made when John Lennon was still alive, before Reagan was even president, much less the assassination attempt, of course, by someone who was obsessed with Jodie Foster.

48:12I mean, you could, I guess, even argue that Taxi Driver created some Travis Bickles, right? But at the very least, it predicted this whole series of Travis Bickles that have existed. I mean, including the Columbine shooters, you could connect so many acts of violence to this kind of psychology that you see taken apart in Travis Bickle. That feels familiar to us now because of current events that have answered it and because this movie's become so iconic. But it must have felt so strange at the time that this was the hero of a movie, you know, that this guy, obviously an antihero, but that he was the protagonist of a movie.

48:41Yeah, absolutely. I think that the interesting part about it is you do sympathize with him, even though he's clearly deranged just because he is such a lonely character. I think that the way the loneliness is depicted throughout the film, you even see it in all of the supporting characters and in his encounters with them. I think about Albert Brooks as his character. He doesn't get much screen time, but he's clearly just pining for Sybil Shepard. and she's completely ignoring him. And she's drawn to Travis, which seems sort of hard to believe on its face. But I think it's just because of his earnestness and his conviction for her, even if it's just the fact that he's just in love with her and seems to be totally devoted and passionate in whatever she is, that's at least something that Albert Brooks certainly isn't bringing to the table.

49:22And that gets her somehow connected to him in a way that she's willing to explore. And I think even the great Martin Scorsese scene, I really love his cameo in this film where he ends up getting in the car just as a fare, and he makes him park outside this apartment, and he says his wife's up there, and he's angry that his wife is cheating on him. His wife's cheating on him with a black man, which he also doesn't like, and he says, I'm going to actually do something about this. You get that same sense of alienation and loneliness from that character, and that scene is actually really pivotal because it's what, in the end, seems to spark something in Travis.

49:55It seems to give him the sense that, wait a second, I sit here and complain a lot about what I see going on in society. I didn't think that, you know what, I could actually go out and get a 44 Magnum and do something about it. Right. So it's only after that that he starts thinking about about assassinating the politician. I think so. Yeah, I think you're right. I think that happens earlier in the movie than than I remembered. Yeah. The Scorsese cameo apparently was was something that was put in at the last minute because whoever was going to do it dropped out of the movie. And it was just sort of like, hey, this is a low budget movie.

50:19Let the director do it. But it ends up being so perfect. Right. Because it ends up sounding as if it's sort of the soul of the movie speaking. And it's actually some of the worst and most violent, horrific, racist, sexist language in the whole movie. And it doesn't come out of Robert De Niro's mouth. It comes out of the director's, right? So it's this weird displacement. It is. And I think, too, did you notice that Scorsese pops up in another scene? Yeah, when he's watching Sybil Shepard walk into the building in the white dress. Yeah. He's just sitting there along the building there and just happens to be someone that Travis walks by.

50:47And it's so weird that he's in the film later, but he's also in that early scene. I don't know quite what to make of that. He's such an unmistakable bystander. It's kind of funny to put him in if you don't want him to be noticed because it's this short little stubby guy with a black unibrow. I mean, nobody else looks like Martin Scorsese. We were talking about loneliness and kind of those supporting characters. Obviously, Iris, the Jodie Foster character, she's someone, too, who is willing, it seems, to prostitute herself because at least someone will listen to her. This character that Harvey Keitel plays, Sport, he says he loves her.

51:15He'll somehow validate her existence. And the only reason, actually, I don't mind the scene between Foster and Keitel, where Keitel basically does this Barry White-esque soliloquy, talking about how happy he is to be with her and how happy he is to have a woman who loves her man and they're dancing. It's a bizarre scene because it does kind of take you out of the moment when you realize that Travis isn't around. Every other moment in the film has been kind of through his lens, and he's not there. And it felt really obtrusive and unnecessary, but then it does explain Iris. If you put it in that context of loneliness, it makes sense that she is this character who finally feels a connection to someone.

51:53Clearly, her parents aren't giving her the kind of validation she needs. This character does. And then you see the link she's willing to go to continue getting that. Yeah, I think that scene accomplishes a lot, actually, when Keitel and Foster dance together because it humanizes them in some way that makes the act of violence at the end of the movie more horrifying. Right. They're not just a pimp and his hooker, but they're two people who, in whatever twisted way, care about each other and need each other. Right. And then also the music in that scene I just thought was incredible. The moment that Keitel goes over and puts the needle down on the record and the music that comes out is Betsy's theme.

52:22It's the theme, the saxophone theme that's been associated with Sybil Shepard through the whole movie. It's the love theme. Right. But somebody else's love theme. It's just a brilliant use of sound. I mean, and as you know, I'm just in love with that Bernard Herrmann score for that movie. Yeah. And why don't we go ahead and jump into that? Because that is a big discovery for me with this film the second time around as well. seeing it again on the big screen and hearing that Bernard Herrmann score and the romanticism of that main theme that you talked about, Betsy's theme. You did write really eloquently about it.

52:49I want to link to that in the notes for the show if anyone wants to check it out. But the split there, there's kind of this schizophrenic quality to the score where you get something so lush and so romantic and so New York as you see him driving around. But juxtaposed with all these kind of degraded images, but then also those main themes that you hear throughout the rest of the film, when he's training, if you will, for his assassination or he's thinking about the things he's going to do and he's really getting worked up about the ills of society. It's so dark. It's so menacing. And again, such a contrast to that great Betsy's theme.

53:24And very old-fashioned, right? I mean, it's like monster movie music or horror movie music. For some reason, this particular screening, going and seeing this 35th anniversary restoration, I was just really struck by the music. It almost seemed like the whole movie was just this huge jazz improvisation. You know, like the music worked so perfectly with the film. And I know that Herman always insisted on extreme control. Like he wanted to write the music he wanted to write and the director had to work around it. And I don't know whether this happened with Scorsese, but I know with Hitchcock, sometimes scenes would have to be extended.

53:51And Hitchcock would make them 30 seconds longer because there were 30 more seconds of music that Herman wanted him to use. Yeah, it's interesting that you mention it. It's almost like wall-to-wall jazz because, of course, Scorsese often gets lumped into that category as someone who has wall-to-wall rock and roll music. It's almost like it's just images going with the sound. And Mean Streets is a lot like that. And then you have Taxi Driver here where you get this full orchestra, as you mentioned, this really old-fashioned kind of classic score. It actually reminded me a lot of those great Miklos Rosha scores from the noirs like Double Indemnity and The Killers.

54:21They're just so, again, menacing and oppressive. It's almost as if these characters just have the weight of the world on their shoulders. And I think that what I really loved about it is it does put this movie squarely in that context between old Hollywood and new Hollywood. It's clearly a new Hollywood film in its audacity and its style, but at the same time, it's rooted in the films that Scorsese grew up obviously loving and idolizing. And I think actually about the end of the film, that great shot that everyone talks about, deservedly so, where after all the violence, we get the overhead shot, the ceiling, that aerial view.

54:53It's great, but then when it cuts outside and you get the crowded streets and the crowded street and you have the cop cars showing up and the sirens going, it really reminded me of something like straight out of Sunset Boulevard. It's like the ending of that movie when everyone's showing up on the scene or even the beginning of that movie when all the cars and you hear the sirens blaring as they're going to Norma Desmond's house. So it clearly has that influence on it. Yeah, I hadn't thought of the Sunset Boulevard, but you're right. It's almost a direct reference to that. And it's that same kind of sense that this personal, intimate, painful story you've been seeing has suddenly become an event on the nightly news.

55:26And you have to switch into that other context. And you're right. It's the same exact note as Sunset Boulevard. It makes sense to have that noir influence a little bit, I think. I mean, obviously, the movie mostly takes place at night and he sees himself, I think, as this kind of dark hero, this dark knight of the underworld. But what's troubling about it, of course, is there's no mystery to solve. There's no femme fatale to try to blame. There's no solution. There's no resolution. There's just life. And that's what makes it feel, I guess, so heavy and so bleak. So I think we should at least touch on, though, the ending of the movie.

55:55I know this is something you talked about with John Swansburg in your spoiler special. And I'm exactly with you guys. I was just nodding my head the whole time I was listening to you because if you had asked me to describe the ending of Taxi Driver, and I would have bet any amount of money that I knew it, I would have recounted the shootout with the pimps and the gun to the head and that amazing overhead tracking shot. that's the end of the movie, right? And then come to find out, no, it's not. I completely forgot about the end with the paper clippings and that whole coda with the letter from Iris's parents, which in itself just seems kind of crazy.

56:25But I'll let you jump in on how much of a shock that was. Yeah, I don't know. What's your policy on spoiling here on FilmSpotting? Can we assume that a movie that's 35 years old, we can now talk about the ending of? I would hope so. So let's go ahead and go for it. All right. Well, so yeah, you have the strange coda, right? So that after the scene that we just talked about, the Sunset Boulevard referencing, you know, pulling out and seeing the cops arriving at the crime scene of the brothel or whatever. Then suddenly we cut to, I guess, sometime in the future. And again, we hear Betsy's theme.

56:53We hear that, you know, romantic theme. And there's this kind of ironic pan across this wall of clippings that you realize is on Travis Bickle's wall in his apartment. Taxi driver becomes local hero, saves prostitute in gun battle. And that either in his mind and his imagination, I guess some people think that this is happening only his imagination, but the film doesn't signal that in any way. It just seems that realistically, he's now become this hero. He somehow talked his way out of the massacre and made himself look like the hero of it. And he gets a letter from Iris's parents, Iris being the Jodie Foster child prostitute character, saying, thank you for returning our daughter to us.

57:27So he's a hero to them. They even say menacingly, maybe you can come and visit us in Pittsburgh sometime. And you think, oh boy, taxi driver to the Pittsburgh years. And then there's a coda to the coda, Right. Then there's the insane part where he picks up Sybil Shepard's character, Betsy, as just a random fare. There's a lot of coincidental cab fares in this in this movie. Right. Because he also picks up the politician that he's planning to kill earlier. That's true. He drives Betsy back to her apartment. And there's this strangely nostalgic feeling to that to that scene, almost as if John and I were saying, almost as if it's like the TV show taxi instead of the movie taxi driver.

57:58Like, hey, you're all right, Travis Bickle, you know, but it has to be ironic and it has to be maybe a fake out of some kind. right? We can't be meant to be left with a feeling that Travis Bickle's just okay. Yeah. And I think maybe you guys touch on this as well. The one cue that Paul Schrader, the writer who we haven't mentioned yet, and Scorsese gives you is in that Bernard Herman score where you have that moment of the backward sound that cues you and cues De Niro. He responds to it as if he's hearing it in the scene where he quickly looks in the rearview mirror. And it's the sense that there's still something lurking back there.

58:28There's still something in his psyche that suggests that all is not well with him and things are not going to go very well. He's going to have another moment like this, but maybe he's not going to be regarded as a hero when that happens. So that part is really interesting. But, yeah, it's hard to really get a handle on what they were going for there because, first of all, you are surprised that he's alive at all. And then I don't think you really buy that Iris is actually just back home in Pittsburgh and is really doing fine. Would she really just go back and resume her life as a teenage girl?

58:55It seems kind of hard to swallow. And her home life could not have been as happy and Christian as all that, right? If she ran away from it and so fiercely refused to go back to it. You wouldn't think so. And then you do add in the Sybil Shepard part. And that is the one part where you said they don't really signal you in any way that this could be like a dream. That's the one part anyway of the coda that seems like there's something so dreamlike about it. We don't even see her get in the taxi, right? He just gets in. They say he's got a fare. He gets in. All of a sudden he looks in his rearview mirror.

59:23I don't think, I could be wrong. I didn't go back and watch the DVD, but I don't think we actually see Sybil Shepard except in the rearview mirror. So there is this sense that it's all his perspective and it's just in his head that maybe she's there. And it does seem crazy that she would get in and all of a sudden be like, do we? Okay. I mean, we see her from that perspective that you see him in the front seat and her behind him in the back seat. Got it. You definitely get a sense that she's really riding in the cab. Because all I remember is the shot where he sees her for the first time and that's how he sees her is through the mirror.

59:51Right. And so it gives me the sense that he's fantasizing almost that it's her. And their conversation is really bizarre. You wonder where could they possibly go in terms of any kind of relationship from there. But with that all said, what does make you think it has to be legitimate or that they're playing it straight in some way is that I've never heard Scorsese or Schrader say anything that suggests otherwise. They've both always kind of dismissed those readings and said that, you know what, it really is legit. And that's why we added that part with the score. So you'll realize that all isn't really well with the world.

1:00:20And actually, Scorsese does the same thing in The King of Comedy. I think maybe a little bit more successfully, but both characters, if you think about Rupert Pupkin and who De Niro plays here, Travis Bickle, they're both lonely, they're both delusional. And at one point, at the end of the film, I'm not spoiling anything for anyone who hasn't seen The King of Comedy, but he really sums up his philosophy. He says that it's better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime. And I think that actually, though, in a much darker way, I think Travis Bickle would agree with that. And so both films actually have these really cynical codas where the heroes are redeemed.

1:00:54They do something really wrong, but the heroes are redeemed by, I guess, society's thirst for sensationalism or the taxi driver in a way, this thirst for blood and vengeance. And I think that somehow they end up being these statements on redemption. Scorsese obviously wants these characters to be redeemed in some way, even after they do terrible things. In King of Comedy, for some reason, it works better for me. I don't know why. I think that the irony at the end of Taxi Driver is just somehow wrong. The movie's not a social satire, really. And suddenly for the length of that coda, it's as if it were.

1:01:22It's as if the end is like the end of network or something, you know, where you sort of envision this dystopic future where things are going to keep getting worse and worse. It just it just doesn't go with the mood of taxi driver somehow. To me, the ending feels like a flaw, one of the few flaws in a really, really great movie. I think I'm with you on that, but it's certainly fun to discuss. One other quick thing I'll mention that really struck me on the big screen, I never noticed on the small screen before, is it really was disappointing to see how Scorsese had to desaturate the colors during the violence.

1:01:49He had to really shift the look of the film completely in order to get an R rating. They had to try to make it a little less vivid, I guess. And I know Michael Chapman, the cinematographer, has said that that was something he, when they restored it, he went out searching for the original film, and apparently it had been destroyed. Scorsese later, I guess, has said that, you know, that's fine. He thinks it actually came out good that way. It's something that ended up working in the end for the film. I don't think it really did. And on the big screen, I really noticed it. It was almost as if someone had flipped a lens or something on the projector when it cuts to that scene.

1:02:19It's true that it's strange looking blood. I hadn't attributed it to the color, but that moment, that famous shot where he's holding his fingers to his head in gun style and then this blood is slowly dripping off. Oh, it's so powerful still and so gross. And the viscosity of the blood really struck me that it was like a lot of extra caro corn syrup in there or something. Well, Taxi Driver, obviously a film that provokes some good discussion. Again, out now in this 35th anniversary celebration of it. It played, unfortunately, if you missed it well, you can catch it in its Blu-ray release coming out this Tuesday.

1:02:48And I mentioned it once, but you can read Dana's great article about the Bernard Herrmann score over at Slate.com. We'll put a link in the notes for this show at filmspotting.net. You guys get to be a Secret Service man. What? I was just curious because I thought maybe I'd make a good one.

1:03:07access to the film spotting archive is just one of the benefits of joining the film spotting family you'll also get bonus shows a weekly newsletter early access to events and more to join go to filmspottingfamily.com and through january 31 if you use promo code supreme you'll get 20 off that's promo code supreme this conversation can serve no purpose anymore goodbye I'm includes podcasters for skateboarding, too, ahead of me,