Admittedly, there’s little to be said about Taxi Driver that hasn’t been noted already. Scorsese’s 1976 look at slightly off-kilter cabbie Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is a noir-style classic that avoids flashiness and focuses on how the “filth” and “sleaze” in one’s environment can cause someone to “thank God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk” or want to “take this city and just … just flush it down the fuckin’ toilet.”
Likewise, the nomadic, insomniac taxi driver who travels from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side, across Harlem, south to JFK and then back to Manhattan via Long Beach is a perfect collector of stories and siphon of moments in a city like New York where cultures clash and each of the millions of apartment buildings secludes a story under the guise of privacy. However, the taxi driver, from the past to the present, also represents a bring in isolation: a bullet-proof glass world separating one person from the wealth of autonomous, nameless characters that enter the backseat, temporarily visiting an existence, but completely separate from it.
The only communication need be an address and nothing more. From this, Scorsese exhibits not only an additional sense of loneliness, but also of servitude, one simultaneously indentured to those who can afford to avoid the subway and those who would be considered the “trash” and “filth” of the streets that scrape together enough money to escape their beaten paths for a while.
The existence of these various social classes, occupations, and endeavors in the back of the same cab is significant in that they don’t ever converge; instead, they exist at different times, but without leaving evidence of their existence for subsequent passengers. This ultimately leads to the narrative of a disconnected city and its individuals, all trapped in their illusory worlds, ambivalent to most everything that doesn’t directly relate to their own little lives.
To say that Scorsese is criticizing New York City in particular would be incorrect – and if he is, then he castigates himself by playing the passenger who keeps the meter running while waiting for his wife to emerge from another man’s apartment, pondering whether or not he should kill her — but, he is critiquing the shift in social energy and interaction after the end of the Vietnam War, a shift that bespeaks to the disjointed nature of society.
This intent is clear when considering that Bickle is a returning war veteran, suffering from insomnia and what would now be classified as PTSD, but Scorsese also adds to this commentary subliminally through the aesthetics of each scene, particularly through the use and exploitation of the colors red, white, and blue.
While the red is often used to create discomfort and foreshadow Bickle’s growing discontent that leads to the bloodbath at the almost-end of the film, its pairing with white and blue in disjointed images suggests that its symbology (that of the flag) has been bastardized and the energy behind “the land of the free” has been transferred into various consumer-driven venues that range through parking lots, Coca-Cola and politics.
The benefits of seeing Taxi Driver on the big screen are many: first, it’s not chopped up and truncated to fit in a wealth of commercials – which I suppose is ironically antithetical to its commentary on consumerism – second, the digitally restored version truly allows for the brilliance of colors within.
One of the first examples to illustrate this disjointed Americana via color is when the viewer sees Bickle’s apartment for the first time, and the camera crawls across a makeshift in-kitchen clothesline that holds three folded shirts, one red, one blue, one white, and two halves of a star on the latter two shorts. Together, they form an entire image signifying the red white and blue of the flag, but the star is severed and doesn’t quite fit together. From here, we move to Bickle on his bed with the blue sky showing through the brick-framed window that also captures Travis in a red and white flannel, sipping from his red and white can of Coca Cola. Coincidence? Possibly, but one of the things to be praised about Scorcese is his meticulousness in regards to setting up a scene – except for that damned ice cream scene in The Aviator that consistently triggers my OCD.
Regardless, Taxi Driver’s color scheme is further utilized each time the campaign headquarters for Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris) is on screen. Throughout the film, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) and Tom (Albert Brooks) wear variations of complimentary blues, reds, and whites to show that both they and their candidate Charles are American through and through. Linking a politician with the American flag certainly isn’t a novel approach to politics, but much like the alternating trucks of red, white, and blue peddle various bits of merchandise that pass through the set of Scorcese’s film, Charles is being sold to the public.
In what might be the second most memorable scene in the film, the brothel bloodbath also utilizes this color scheme when it offers the audience the red bloody bodies of Sport (Harvey Keitel), the white shirts of the paparazzi snapping photos and the blue of the police officers rushing to the scene, suggesting that this disjointed America has become three separate forces, one representing violence, another exploitation, the last protection. And while these specific definitions of this palate are not concrete throughout, it’s striking that the culmination of the film offer an exacerbated, cynical look at the three t-shirts from the very beginning that hang innocuously on a clothes line as if waiting for a breeze to blow them apart.
