Taxi Driver is one of my all-time favorite films, and I think I might have a hard time making a new observation about it. It’s one of the reasons I count Martin Scorsese as one of my favorite living directors, even over Steven Spielberg. Some directors just have a certain feel to their work. Speilberg is the master storyteller, guiding the eye and the audience’s attention to whatever he wants them to see. Clint Eastwood, in his better works at least, has a graceful swoop over the scene that takes in everything in a slow and steady pace. Quentin Tarantino’s work is full of crackling energy that almost implies some drug use by everyone involved. Scorsese has something similar to Tarantino in terms of energy, but it always felt to me like an urgency of a different sort. I chalk it up to generational differences, honestly.
However, for this go-around with Taxi Driver, I want to talk more about what it might be unintentionally doing for a certain class of film buff.
I tend to watch a lot of video essays on YouTube, and one from a channel called Eyebrow Cinema talked about the concept of the Film Bro. Basically, the Film Bro is defined as that cinephile that really loves a certain type of film. These are young men (hence the name) who got really into certain films, the sort that have male protagonists who, in one form or another, flout society’s rules and may even get away with it. I read once that director David Fincher’s then 13 year old daughter told her father that her new male friend counted Fight Club as his favorite film to which Fincher told his daughter not to be friends with that boy anymore. That’s something edging close to the Film Bro: a young man who doesn’t quite get that the anti-hero in a film is not exactly a role model.
Case in point: I have, in the classroom, directed students to recommend media they like as a form of practice for public speaking, and for a few years, Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street would get recommended by someone sooner or later every semester, and it was always a young man who wanted to say how funny or cool it was that these stockbrokers were taking drugs and having wild parties and the like. The more subtle moments that point out the film is an indictment of the get-rich-quick desires of many people that allowed scammers like the real Jordan Belfort to get away with what he did with minimal punishment are generally overlooked. Essentially, the 18-to-22 year old men who recommend this film, and I would always ask them when they were finished if they observed what I just pointed out, didn’t see the film as a condemnation but a celebration. Some of them refused to see it even after I pointed it out. That’s more or less understandable. Films like this fit a narrative of “hey, that’s funny!’ and not “hey, that’s a problem of human nature!”
I would also generally point out that Goodfellas, essentially the same film as The Wolf of Wall Street was actually a better work from the same director, but the only kid who decided to take me up on that suggestion came back to tell me that, no, Wolf of Wall Street was better. I can’t say I was surprised, but I sure was disappointed.
What does all this have to do with Taxi Driver? Well, simple: for me, this was the sort of film that made me the closest I ever was to a Film Bro. To be clear, Eyebrow Cinema’s video made it clear that there’s nothing wrong with liking or even loving Film Bro films because many of them are great films in their own right. I agree. The issue is more why do people like these films. If you watched Fight Club and thought the message was to start a fight club, congratulations. That is the opposite of the film’s intentions. The same is more or less true about Taxi Driver. Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle isn’t an endorsement for anything. He’s a warning.
Look at Travis for a moment. He takes a job driving a taxi because he can’t sleep. His apartment, one that grows gradually more cluttered as the film goes on, is a mess that looks like it might have to aspire to be considered slum housing. He has no real friends, and the closest he has to a mentor to go to for advice is another cabbie, a guy named Wizard (Peter Boyle). Wizard, however, doesn’t have anything particularly sage to say about Travis’s problems, and even he knows it. Then again, Travis doesn’t even know how to vocalize what’s bothering him. Travis has no idea how to relate to others, and when he’s not out driving, he’s at home not doing much. Halfway through the film, he buys some guns, and then he starts practicing his shooting, fashioning make-shift weapons, exercising excessively, and monologuing, sometimes starting over when he’s the only one listening.
The one bright point for Travis is Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a woman Travis idolizes as the one good thing in the entire city. And since this is 1970s cinematic New York and Travis sees a lot of things he disapproves of, that’s saying something. But Travis’s inability to connect to others is on full display when it comes to Betsy. I’m not referring to his disastrous second date when he takes her to a prono theater. I’m referring to the fact he’s put her up on a pedestal before he’s even spoken to her or learned her name. His general talk to her on their first date suggests he might not be completely wrong about her, but there’s nothing in this film that suggests Travis knows how to really deal with other people. Travis is, in many respects, what today might be called an Incel. I don’t think sex would have prevented Travis’s violent turn, one where if the ending is literal makes a hero out of a guy who is only a hero because his first target, a popular presidential candidate, has Travis’s poor luck working in the candidate’s favor.
No, Travis needs, well, someone. Anyone. Loneliness is a real problem, and he isn’t sure how to deal with it. He can’t even put it into words. Instead, he seethes with anger at the crime and injustice he sees around him, or things he perceives as crime and injustice, but that doesn’t stop him from buying weapons from a shifty salesman, and earlier interactions with another cabbie might even suggest this is not Travis’s first time dealing with less-than-legal activities. Travis makes himself out to be judge, jury, and executioner, and he isn’t better at the end of the film. No, he’s going to do it again, but he was never well. There’s a point where he makes a meal out of a bowl of white bread, sugar, and what looks like whiskey. He points his gun at his TV or pedestrians as he looks down from a tall building. He talks about washing away the scum, and pretty much everyone he sees is, in his mind, scum. He has to wash human bodily fluids of all kinds out of his cab.
But as I watch this film in 2023, I know that it wasn’t that long ago the CDC issued a warning about an epidemic of loneliness, other countries are warning their citizens not to travel here due to concerns over the mass shootings that happen far too often, and I think to myself, “Did Taxi Driver predict all this?” I don’t think it did, not intentionally. This is a film about one man’s disintegration. But sadly, like Network, another 70s film I count among my all-time favorites, Taxi Driver, a film that famously inspired a man to shoot Ronald Reagan, seems to be more true today than it was when it came out. The only real difference was Taxi Driver is not a satire.
This is why I couldn’t call myself a Film Bro today if I ever would have: as much as I like a lot of 70s era antihero films, they sure can be depressing if you stop and think about what they might actually be saying.
NEXT: Well, not all of my all-time favorite films from the 70s were dark stories of antiheroes. Be back soon when I look at the film I have probably seen more times than anything else in my entire life: 1977’s Star Wars.
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