Everybody has that one movie with which they have a spotty history. Usually it stems from childhood, where your mind is more malleable and not as critical. Maybe it’s bad dialogue or a half-baked story. They could be ideas that seemed profound when we were more suggestible and now seem primitive or false. It’s the type of work you can convince yourself still has “artistic” merit in that it ties you to some former self, but chances of you being able to perceive it as the accomplishment it once was will always be difficult. Sometimes the best we can hope for is to view it as a time capsule, or something that reflects growth from who we used to be.
There’s a handful that would be on my shortlist. The one I have chosen to focus on may not strike anyone as a film to hold deep remorse over. By all accounts, Taxi Driver (1976) is a stone-cold masterpiece. I would even say so myself. There hasn’t been a better Robert De Niro performance. The Bernard Herrmann score sizzles with sinister jazz tones. The story understands the seediness of New York and the way that one can feel isolated before it was remodeled. Even the way Albert Brooks inhabits the background is so wonderfully goofy in small ways. It can be argued that Martin Scorsese has made more accomplished works, but to me, there is such an understanding of character that has never been matched. I’d argue it’s one of the most quintessential portraits of America following The Vietnam War, free from the sentimentality of more directly critical works like Coming Home (1978) or The Deer Hunter (1978). Travis Bickel is the man of failed promises, who never got his parade and is reduced to driving around the most inconsiderate among us.
I could go on, but the important thing to understand in this situation is that deep down, I love Taxi Driver. When I was younger, I’d watch obsessively and label it as my favorite movie, often interchangeably with Annie Hall (1977). This was so much the case that I saw the Fathom Event for the 35th anniversary and nabbed a commemorative poster from the lobby.
To an embarrassing degree, I was the one in the friend group who would be forwarded Taxi Driver adjacent news, such as when Chloe Grace Moretz did a photoshoot dressed like Jodie Foster. Even in the case of knock-offs, I was a bit too impressionable to “angry man gets revenge” narratives like Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America (2011) in which a disgruntled individual in his version of Idiocracy (2006) or Natural Born Killers (1994) decides to murder everyone he deems to be ruining society. In my early 20s, it felt cathartic. Call it a byproduct of working as a courtesy clerk amid an unprocessed depression, but it gave me the release I needed for how I felt clocking in to the part-time nine-to-five… for a time. Once Sandy Hook happened and mass shootings escalated, I ended up having a years-long self-evaluation on violence that’s resulted in me being so put off by bullet-driven vengeance that I have never appreciated John Wick.
Despite being able to accept my disavowal of God Bless America, Taxi Driver is one of the great anomalies that I’ve battled with for the better part of a decade. This can largely be because of intent. Goldthwait may believe he had nuance to his dark comedy, but it’s still ultimately a bare-bones story. Taxi Driver, in some respect, isn’t solely about the violence. It’s about Travis Bickel. It’s about his isolation and search for meaning. It’s a larger narrative about how America presents itself as the land of opportunity, but can disappoint those who sacrificed the most. Of course, there’s contextual information like how President Nixon extended the war to win an election. There’s the symbolic corruption of Watergate. It’s a time when America is trying to rebuild itself into a nation that stands for something, and New York is in dire need of repair.
In sharing my complicated opinions around Taxi Driver, I once had a friend suggest that her favorite movie was Bonnie & Clyde (1967). It didn’t mean that she was likely to rob a bank. On a base level, I understand the logic to recognize the divide between cinema and reality, even as both of our examples have their own ironic ties to real-world violence. Taxi Driver famously inspired John Hinckley Jr. to attempt an assassination on President Reagan to impress Jodie Foster (Stephen Sondheim even made a musical about it). This film disproved how much distance there was between celluloid and our brains to the extent that we still question any story about an angry loner. While Fight Club (1999) took this to ultimate parody, Taxi Driver still had this rawness that makes me question what I love about it.
The more I’ve reflected on my early 20s, the more I’ve accepted that it was a dark period for me mentally. Transitioning to life post-high school wasn’t without some positives, but there were a lot of complications.
Chief among them was the issue of the friend group. In high school, I was very active in the creative writing, yearbook, and journalism departments. Along with other rogue groups, there was a constant stimulation that gave me enough distraction when one proved tedious. When perusing old diaries, I was especially critical of the group I hung out with during lunch. Because it was the era of George W. Bush, there was a tendency to praise transgressive humor while pitting yourself against the familiar follies of the day. If you asked my long term memory what I though, I’d easily say that these people were “fine,” though I seemed eager to remove myself from them at the time to the point that I pretended to fall asleep during a group outing to see Brothers (2009) just because I didn’t want to be there.
At no point would I say that this group “hated” me, but they encouraged an antagonistic and sometimes nihilistic view of the world. It made sense given that they quoted South Park while awaiting the latest Saw (2004) entry. My sister had artwork from Happy Bunny joking about how stupid everyone was. On some level, it’s the universal code of teenagers. What I experienced was not unique to a Post-9/11 era, where I first began to see the world as divided but lacked the tools to fully understand how. Even the fact that I chose to openly joke about being gay just to annoy people caused them to sincerely tell me their personal fears, and see the group as predatory.
For as much as college was a chance to reinvent myself, on some level, you fall back on what was always there. Acting out was the easiest way to get attention. I once wrote a script for a co-anchor that would include her being “censored,” meaning that she could say gibberish. The rest of the staff was confused because it leaned too much into humor that hadn’t been approved. Again, I don’t know if this is unique to my generation, but the transgression ran deep. Misfortune seemed funny and, since I didn’t really know the lines, sometimes meant I came across as a bully. It should be noted that this was only a minor part of my larger repertoire, but it said something that my go-to source of humor was to embrace the broken bone-laced slapstick of the cartoons I watched like The Simpsons and Family Guy.
This could also be because my life wasn’t in the best place. Outside of my initial year, my grades plummeted by the semester. I had a job that gave me the freedom that money does, but I never felt passionate enough to pick up my check. High school friends were transitioning into their college phases and becoming too busy to deal with me. There was also Facebook, which, regrettably, became my outlet for writing every thought. Given that I believed that nobody was reading what I had to say, I got a bit too candid at times and I’m sure turned off a lot of people. Most importantly, I think it was responsible for losing the one friend whom I have missed most in the years since. Whoever said that you’ll do things you’ll regret when you’re angry was onto something. Add in a strained home life, and you’ll understand where my head was at in my early 20s.
Something that I’ve come to learn is that having a “dark” phase in your early 20s is very common among those who are personally frustrated with something in their life. It’s partially the disappointment of needing to start at the bottom and work your way up the ladder to a level of respect that seems hopeless on day one. This becomes difficult when you’re an introvert who doesn’t know a lot about yourself to begin with. Add in that I spent the previous few years listening to punk music where the message was to be your authentic self, being around so many people who felt shallow or even fake was soul-crushing. Not to mention that the early 2010s also saw the rise of the most boring era of mainstream rock radio, thanks to an indie and folk invasion.
To start wrapping Taxi Driver back into the narrative, I think you can understand what was attractive about Travis Bickel to someone who seemed aimless. There was something to the voice-over that felt groundbreaking. It gave you the interiority of a man who wandered through life while collecting money from passengers. They were unpleasant to the point that they made you feel somehow more isolated. It was a drama written by a suicidal man living out of his car and a director going through a severe cocaine addiction. It was hardwired into a mentality that I’ve never felt connected to, and yet the dreamlike nature caused the deepest thoughts to emerge and reveal this figure who transcends time.
Like the best storytellers, there is a hypnotic way that one comes to trust a figure like Bickel. He exists in the moral grey area where what he does is ultimately selfish and psychopathic, but seems persuasive if you piece everything together. Having lived a life where he’s helping people who don’t seem to respect his sacrifice, it makes sense that he would make a snap judgment to save a helpless young prostitute from a manipulative pimp. It’s a plot reminiscent of chivalry literature where a knight saves a princess. The difference with Bickel is, at best, a retired military man with an undiagnosed mental condition. Answers will differ depending on who you ask.
A major reason for this is that writer Paul Schrader’s perspective may differ from the reality he’s set him up in. He writes Bickel with sympathy and an eagerness to understand. Scorsese, meanwhile, seems more intent on exploring how disconnected from his reality he is. Many have discussed the nature of taking your first date to an X-rated work, though other aspects seem like a man who is on the verge of getting it right. If he met the right crowd, he’d be able to start getting organizized and see the larger potential of his life. As it stands, he’s among the lowlifes who only wish to bitterly tear the world apart. Bickel is a man with an introspection that dwindles throughout the film, revealing the perils of isolation and the ways it builds a desperation for any validation. To his credit, he does try to direct that energy into a political campaign to help others, but it’s short-lived thanks to the aforementioned bad date.
When you’re in your early 20s and don’t have a great grasp of nuance, a lot of the larger messaging can be lost on you. What is meant as commentary is reduced to a story of causality where an angry man takes justice into his own hands. During the times when you feel powerless and desperately craving control, there’s this sense that lashing out is the only way to achieve it. You’re nothing without sacrificing something about yourself to help others, even if they don’t want you to. Listening to the voice-over manifesto where he screws up midway through and starts over can seem aspirational when Schrader likely wrote it as a feeble joke of a man overstepping his boundaries. When all you want to do is tell customers at work to calm down, Bickel acting out makes sense. When you’re at a college and meeting people who seem disingenuous, Bickel’s ponderousness makes sense.
A difference between me and the classmate who worshipped Fight Club was that I ultimately wasn’t a nihilist at heart. Whereas he made his own soap and released shitty metal music, I was craving positive attention. There was a desire to collaborate and make a small operation come together. Even then, there were those times when a handful of us would delve into the dark stuff, the “real” stuff, to understand the greater realities of our world. On some level, they were all more politically tapped in than I ever was, so I was at best approaching the world with an “impressionistic” lens. I was fine just delving into complicated emotions, believing it would help me process them better. For example, I had no applicable way of adapting the lessons of Lars Von Trier to a larger worldview. Similarly, I outgrew Bret Easton Ellis once I realized he was a whiny self-entitled brat.
To put it simply, Taxi Driver is a difficult film for me to say I love because of this history. When you’re posting impulsively online while feeling isolated only brings about unengaging thoughts. Even as my life spiraled, I had Bickel to symbolize this swirling nothingness. By my mid-20s, I was reaching a point where I needed to reassess how I saw the world. Along with turning away from violent revenge stories, I began to question how I treated others. Despite evidence to the contrary, I consider 25 the age at which I began actively trying to be a good person. I put aside my personal grievances and applied myself. While it still meant I was behind the curve, my direction was at least one I could be proud of.
To say I regret loving Taxi Driver is more to say I regret my early 20s. On the one hand, there were a lot of formative friendships I made at the time that shaped my life. However, arrogance defined other aspects of my career to debilitating degrees. Even as I watch movies like The People’s Joker (2024) that comment on how messy some people’s early 20s are, there is still that wish that I was more focused. More importantly, I just wanted to know what I wanted sooner. I wanted to have a better sense of self so that I could avoid the pitfalls of Bickel. Then again, I wish I had enough nuance to know that it was criticism and not a blueprint. Somehow, I understood that Hinckley was wrong without seeing the larger irony of my struggle. Idiot.
This may be why, during certain periods, I am more likely to call The King of Comedy (1982) my favorite Scorsese film. Even if they’re thematic kissing cousins, I don’t have the baggage with Rupert Pupkin that I do Bickel. Despite Pupkin taking things further, there isn’t that recognition of Bickel staring into the abyss and feeling like you’re alongside him. Even as I’m able to grow and understand the complexities of its narrative, Taxi Driver is that reminder of seeing it as a story of isolation and nothing else. Deep down, I know there’s something more, but I still can’t forget watching it and doing the theater scene where he points a finger gun at the screen from memory. While I recognize his appeal is that he is capable of redemption, I think a 20ish me would’ve said that the world would never give him it.
Despite not seeing Travis Bickel as the archetype in any way, Taxi Driver makes it easy for me to understand the appeal of incel culture. While I have no association with the group and actively want those involved to seek help, I recognize that your early 20s can be a rough transition period where nothing makes sense. Even if I don’t see the artistic merit of Joker (2019) as anything but empty nihilism, I get what would attract certain types to it… and I don’t fault them. Unless you mapped out your life, post-high school is a complete mess of a vision and one that will only make sense in time. Luckily, I had some direction in that I was in a journalism program that gave me a creative outlet. And yet sometimes I feel like I squandered it because I was feeding off the novelty of being rude. I imagine how much better my life would be if I understood how to convey compassion at that age and have it mean something. What if I understood how to be focused and achieve my goals?
My best advice is that sometimes you need to fall to get back up. Taxi Driver is an odd film to have a spotty history with because nobody is saying it’s dated or terrible. While it explores the abhorrence of humanity, there is still something redemptive and even artful about how it’s portrayed. Somewhere in the dreamlike execution, you’ll find the good in a person trying to feel like they matter. There’s no denying that there are better ways to have gone that way, but the subversiveness is what makes the story so attractive. Even if I used it mostly as escapism, I’ll always be left questioning why I wanted to escape there. There have always been better places to visit than the dark recesses of a lonely man’s mind. However, none of them offer as perplexing an experience that’s sure to keep you questioning your own sanity.
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