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| Taxi Driver (1976) | |
| Plot Synopsis (continued)
In a room aglow with incongruous sacramental candles and decorated with wall posters of rock stars, Travis wants to strike up a friendship with Iris instead of having sex. She calls herself "Easy" (the first person with that nickname crossing his path was gun-seller "Easy" Andy). While she prepares to undress, she claims that she doesn't remember the incident in the back of his cab when he first saw her. Travis insists that she keep her blouse on. Unlike Betsy's untouchable sexuality, the young lover Iris helps Travis unbuckle his pants and pull down his zipper. Bewildered by two different polarities of womanhood and alternative sexualities, she is as unreal an abstraction to him as Betsy was.
Treating her like his own child, he attempts to rescue her and persuade her to give up her life of pimping. When she realizes that he is not interested in sex with her, she is touched by his caring and agrees to have breakfast with him the next day. Travis hesitates about the time to see her, because it seems to interfere with his planned assassination schedule, but then agrees. As he leaves, he remembers to introduce himself, and then sweetly bids her goodbye until the next day: "So long, Iris. See you tomorrow. Sweet Iris." The hotel manager appears from a darkened doorway at the end of the hall. Travis gives the man a $20 bill [the same crumpled $20 bill given him earlier by Sport to keep him quiet?]: "This is yours. Spend it right." He is taunted by the old man and again identified by his boots as a Western cowboy: "Come back any time cowboy." Travis is revolted and disgusted by Iris' life as a runaway prostitute with "no place else to go" and content to work for a macho pimp. In the next brilliant, memorable scene over breakfast, Travis takes Iris to a coffee shop where she has toast with jelly and sugar on top. [This conversational scene parallels his coffee shop "date" with Betsy, but this time it follows an 'aborted' sexual encounter.] He becomes obsessed with saving the fresh-faced girl from her circumstances and restoring her to her family and school:
Befriending her, he again vainly tries to urge her to leave her pimp Sport, revolted by how she is content to corrupt herself and sell her body at such a young age. She tells him that she likes being with Sport and doesn't want salvation. When he tells her that her pimp has no respect for her, calling him "the lowest kind of person in the world...the scum of the earth," she begins to be persuaded to leave her low-life. Then, Travis offers to give her money to go live in a commune in Vermont (to finance her escape from Sport) but he declines to join her:
Feeling compelled to talk to Sport in the reddish glare of the light, Iris describes her unhappiness to her streetwise pimp. With a velvety smooth manner, Sport casts a spell over her and coaxes her into resuming her life as a young street hooker. He dances with her cradled in his arms while soothing her. He strokes her hair gently, revealing one obscene, red-enameled sharp fingernail as she melts to his attentiveness:
At the firing range, rapid-fire shots blast from Travis' .44 Magnum as he practices more to become a crack shot at the target. In another part of his crusading plan to cleanse, save and redeem society, (and to demonstrate his love for Iris), Travis makes more preparations to bring 'rain' upon the city by doing "somethin' very important." In his apartment where he wears a white western-style shirt [foreshadowing the bloody, Western shoot-out], he polishes his boots and burns some of the dried, wilted flowers intended for Betsy. After sharpening his knife, he tapes it to the side of his boot. He counts out $500 (in $100 bills) for Iris, accompanied by a poorly-scrawled, hand-written letter (put in an envelope addressed to Iris Steensman):
His apartment is neater and more orderly - the floor is less cluttered. Travis has determined to act out his neurotic world view and fight evil with violence. He explains his mission ("to do somethin") in voice-over - to pursue Presidential candidate Palantine and commit a grandiose act - an assassination. Instead of holding evil in check, he unleashes incredible brutality from his troubled psyche:
To exorcise his empty, tormented life, and to do something for which he will finally be recognized, he turns to a violent, insanely-destructive solution for his cathartic salvation. Emerging from his Checker cab at torso-level while Palantine speaks to an assembled crowd at Columbus Circle, Travis blends into the audience wearing a "We Are the People" button. (Palantine's gestures with arms outstretched model the statue behind him.) As the camera slowly pans up from his waist-level, it reveals Travis' inappropriately-severe Mohawk Indian haircut (a single strip of hair down the middle of his scalp) - a clear signal that he has finally snapped and adopted a military-style haircut. [The haircut was first used by the 101st Airborne before D-Day activities in WWII.] Travis' clapping sounds solitary when he joins the crowd in applause. When the rally ends, Travis pushes and works his way through the crowd toward the detested politician Palantine, photographed from an eye-level perspective. Before he can get close enough to kill Palantine, the Secret Service bodyguard he had spoken to earlier spots him. Travis flees, barely eluding the agents' pursuit. Frustrated because his blood lust hasn't been satisfied, a stripped-to-the-waist Travis downs more pain pills with beer in his apartment. His mattress is rolled up on his bed. His guns are laid out on his table. He goes looking for Iris, driving to the apartment which Sport uses for his prostitution ring. That afternoon before Travis arrives, Sport is approached by a middle-aged white Mafioso (Robert Maroff) who receives a cash payment. Resembling an Indian with his severe haircut [and not a cowboy], Travis greets Sport in a friendly manner and then baits him with continued questions about Iris:
In a shocking, cold-blooded act, Travis wreaks vengeance on Iris' abductor - he sticks a gun point-blank into Sport's gut and shoots, wounding him in the stomach. A few moments later, he enters the darkened stairway leading to Iris' apartment where he approaches the bouncer-manager-pimp of the hotel rooms (used as a brothel). In another gory scene of incredible orgiastic violence and cold-blooded slaughter, partially filmed in slow-motion, he shoots and blows off part of the pimp's right hand. The blast splatters blood and causes echoes throughout the corridors. [Travis' violent act is symbolic of the Vietnam War itself - an outburst of insanity.] Another gunshot sounds behind Travis - he is wounded on the left side of his neck - and begins to bleed profusely. Travis turns to look behind him and sees Sport, mortally wounded. He quickly guns him down at the end of the corridor. As Travis is trying to finish off the pimp-manager on the stairs, he is again shot from behind in the right shoulder/arm by a Mafioso (Bob Maroff) (one of Sport's gangster associates and Iris' customer). Wounded and staggering, Travis kills the gangster by filling his face and body full of bullets, causing him to fall backwards into Iris' room. Still alive, the wounded bouncer-pimp crashes atop Travis and wrestles him to the ground - they thrash around into Iris' apartment where Iris is shrieking and frozen in fear. Travis pulls his combat knife from his boot and impales the bouncer's/pimp's left hand. He reaches over and picks up the revolver from the now-dead Mafioso on the floor and shoots the pimp point-blank in the cheek - brains are splattered onto the wall and Iris is distraught by the gory slaughter. With two different guns, Travis attempts to shoot himself in the neck, but the guns click empty. Exhausted and struggling, he simply collapses onto the red velvet sofa next to a fear-stricken Iris. His head slowly drops back amidst the bloodbath. When the police arrive with guns drawn, Travis is unable to speak. In a gruesome closeup, he helplessly raises a blood-soaked, dripping finger to his head and makes explosive sounds with his mouth as he mimics pulling the trigger three times in a mock-suicide: "Pgghew! Pgghew! Pgghew!" At the end, Travis wishes to sacrifice himself as the ultimate act of fulfillment, cleansing, and purification, but his suicide attempt fails. He slowly loses consciousness from massive blood loss, and his head falls backward. [He certainly seems to die, but is he dead?] In an overhead tracking shot, the camera slowly pans over the bloody trail of carnage in the room and down the stairs (Iris is crouched and shaking, Travis lies back on the sofa next to two blood-soaked bodies on the floor, three police officers stand at the door with their guns drawn, puddles and splatters of blood cover the hallway corridor, discarded weapons, Sport's body is at the end of the hallway, and police are holding back crowds that have gathered at the doorway). There are flashing lights and curious onlookers assembled on the street outdoors. To his surprise, society and the newspapers absolve him of his sins and praise him for his bloody sacrifice and vigilante bravery.
The society, almost as sick as Travis himself, idolizes the psycho-pathic assassin with guns drawn for cleaning up the filth and dirtiness of the city in the monumental slaughter. A tracking shot moves from a new portable TV across to the apartment wall where headlines of newspaper clippings are attached. They proclaim his brave, redemptive deeds:
During the slow pan across the wall, an emotional letter of thanks is read, in voice-over (the voice of an uneducated man), by Iris' grateful father. Travis emerges as society's hero for his ultimately cleansing and redemptive act. And in his martyrdom to cleanse the world, he sends a young girl home to her parents - freeing her from her pimp's grasp:
At the end of the clippings, the hand-written letter is attached to the wall. In the ironic, closing sequence, Travis is recovered and unpunished. He has been released from his obsessive torment, and is back in his mundane job as a cabbie. He peacefully talks to his cabbie friends (Wizard, Dough Boy, and Charlie T) while waiting for a fare in front of the St. Regis Hotel - a more civilized part of the city. Travis is wearing his standard cabbie clothes - a light-brown jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots. A passenger has entered Travis' cab, the front cab in the waiting line in front of the hotel. It is Betsy. She is the first to speak after a long silence - she is uneasy, wary, cool, and distant, but knows of his noble deed and is a bit awed by his celebrity and notoriety for cleansing the city of its scum. Travis reveals a quiet smile on his face and watches her in the rear-view mirror. When she arrives at her destination after a basically inconsequential ride, she gets out and Travis declines her fare.
He drives off into the dark night. The camera tracks backward from Betsy on the sidewalk as the cab pulls away. Travis adjusts the rear-view mirror to look back. [How cleansed and saved is Travis really? How long will it be before the pathological killer turns back to more ritualistic violence and bloody retaliation, confusing murder with sacrifice?] The credits play over further surrealistic images of New York City at night, from a cabbie's perspective.
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