#52 ‘Taxi Driver’
The Gospel According to Travis: Isolation, Guns, and the Cult of the Male Martyr
Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) is the patron saint of sad, lonely men who think being misunderstood is a personality trait and that salvation lies in a bullet. It’s a technical masterpiece, a psychological character study, and—let’s be honest—a dangerous little fever dream in which white male alienation is elevated to biblical significance while women, cities, and teenage girls are left to rot in the periphery.
Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a Vietnam vet and cab driver with insomnia and a hero complex the size of Manhattan. He’s disconnected from society, women, and himself—but instead of, say, going to therapy, he buys a small arsenal, lifts weights in his filthy apartment, and shaves his head into the kind of haircut that screams “I have thoughts about purity.”
We are meant to pity him, to peer into his diary of existential despair and see a tortured soul adrift in a morally decaying world. But here’s the thing: Travis isn’t a victim of the world. He’s a product of it. The film lets him grow increasingly unhinged while pretending he’s gaining clarity. His solution to feeling invisible? Become a vigilante messiah, complete with bloodshed and a martyr complex. It’s not redemption. It’s narcissism with a kill count.
Then there’s Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), the cool, competent campaign worker who’s too put-together for Travis, which of course makes her his obsession. He takes her on a date to a porn theater—because he doesn’t understand women, or boundaries, or reality—and then punishes her for being offended. His emotional maturity is stuck somewhere between a tantrum and a manifesto, and the film lets him spiral without accountability.
And then we come to Iris (Jodie Foster), the underage sex worker Travis decides to “save.” She’s 12. He’s armed. And the film’s moral compass? Spinning wildly. Iris isn’t a character—she’s a concept. She doesn’t need rescuing so much as he needs to rescue her, to justify his rage, his loneliness, his fantasy of moral purpose. And when he guns down her pimps and clients in a bloodbath, the city calls him a hero.
That’s the twist of Taxi Driver—a twist too many miss: Travis is celebrated, not condemned. He is praised, not punished. He commits mass murder and is rewarded with headlines and a wink from the woman who once rejected him. It’s satire, yes, but it’s also prophecy: a blueprint for decades of pop culture antiheroes who walk the line between critique and glamorization—and usually fall on the wrong side.
Yes, the filmmaking is exquisite. Bernard Herrmann’s score curls around the film like a nervous breakdown. De Niro gives one of the most unsettling performances ever committed to film. But Taxi Driver is also a litmus test: it shows you the disease, then dares you to sympathize with it.
4 out of 5 rearview mirrors
(One for Scorsese’s direction. One for De Niro’s performance. One for the score. One for having the guts to let its protagonist remain a monster. The missing star? Lost in the smirk of every man who saw this film and thought, “Yeah. I am just like Travis.”)
