Our nation has persisted in this state for so long that when we watch Taxi Driver, we always watch it with John Hinckley. It is a film that forces us to empathize with a homicidal sociopath. It is a film that forces us to listen to the director deliver a racist and misogynist diatribe demanding we imagine what it would look like to shoot a woman in the face and the genitals. As Travis Bickle sits quietly in the driver’s seat thinking about this, Martin Scorsese’s character tells him that he doesn’t need to respond. Obviously the viewers are just as spooked as Bickle, but in our case, we are the ones paying for this experience. We realize that, as a taxi driver and likely as a Marine before that, Bickle has probably heard these kinds of rants more times than he can count. If we watch enough movies, we have too.
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One of the signs of a great work of art is that it means different things to us at different times in our lives. When I first watched Taxi Driver on a VHS from the county library in my family’s basement, I barely understood it, but I certainly felt it as a teenage punk. I’m not sure how many times I’ve seen the film since then, but it’s certainly a story I know well. A few years ago, as a graduate student teaching a genre studies seminar, I lucked out when the historic theater in our town screened a series of crime films – including Taxi Driver.
I had structured a good portion of my course around film noir and its legacy, so Taxi Driver was on my syllabus. All of the students were women, so we spent a lot of time critiquing gendered representations of violence, and after Donald Trump was elected president midway through the semester, we wrestled with the irrationality and injustice of American culture. We see things differently depending on where we are and when. Taxi Driver persists, yet it is never exactly the same thing. Never before have Travis Bickle’s madness and cruelty been clearer to me. Never have I been so reluctant to dismiss his hatred of women as general misanthropy or mere social blindness. Never before has the specter of Travis Bickle been such a real threat to my community.
That September, John Hinckley Jr. had been released from the federal psychiatric institution at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, and moved in with his mother in our town of Williamsburg, Virginia. I doubt I would have recognized the man had I seen him in the fifty-mile radius he was permitted, but I was occasionally reminded of the possibility. Williamsburg is the kind of town where so many retirees write spiteful rants to the local newspaper that they fill the whole back page with them and post more on the website. This section, called “The Last Word,” is a favorite among locals, and it isn’t exaggeration to say it is a large part of what keeps that paper afloat. In the years leading up to Hinckley’s final release from institutional care, my wife and I read plenty of complaints about the federal judges who approved increasingly long leave periods to visit his mother.
My wife was surprised the system would allow this. I shrugged and commented that, as long as those old folks complaining publically weren’t politicians or Jodie Foster, they didn’t have anything to worry about. Then I heard that Hinckley was known to go to movies around town. Obviously the conditions of his release forbid a whole list of activities, but these are mostly related to his internet use. Other than pornography, there don’t seem to be restrictions on the kinds of movies Hinckley is allowed to watch.
Inevitably, I was thinking of this when I went to the screening of Taxi Driver. I knew the film well enough, but it had long faded in my mind as some weird teenage fever dream, and I was excited to finally have the opportunity to see it on the big screen. Of course, my excitement was far from psychotic obsession, so I knew that – if he were allowed – John Hinckley absolutely would be in that movie theater with me.
This awareness was not fear – or at least it was no different than my awareness on any other school day. Of course, strictly speaking, John Hinckley would be the last person to interrupt a screening of his favorite movie after being incarcerated for thirty-five years, but some other madman could always shoot up the place. The summer we moved to Williamsburg, James Holmes styled himself as the Joker and killed twelve people during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. Including seventy non-fatal casualties, that night was the worst mass shooting in the US to that point, surpassing the Columbine High School attack that marked such a turning point in my teenage understanding of the world. Back in the eighties, Hinckley had been more interested in quality than quantity. By “quality,” I of course mean fame. Hinckley dreamed that the fame of his targets would transfer to him. He wasn’t seeking infamy through sheer statistics like our more recent shooters.
There were not many people in the theater that night, and we sat far apart. The situation eerily reminded me of the porno theaters in the film itself. Taxi Driver was never meant to be a comfortable film to watch, but given the turn that American culture has taken since its release, it feels particularly embarrassing to watch it now – especially in a small town’s clean, quaint, historic theater. Though we might wax snarky on the redevelopment of Times Square or critique the notorious policing tactics that “cleaned up” such neighborhoods in New York City, Taxi Driver’s America is still, generally speaking, our world. It is our world because suburbanites imagine it to be so when they speak of “urban problems” and because we have made it so by mindlessly accepting violence and avarice. We have allowed the idiocies and horrors depicted in the film to persist by avoiding every sociopolitical challenge of the past half-century.
Taxi Driver is about the decay of cities, of culture, and of people’s minds. It is about people’s attempts to survive as the world around them disintegrates. Idealists volunteer for political campaigns hoping to stop or reverse this process. Opportunists profit from the disintegration, selling drugs, guns, and sex. But most people just do their best to get by, working mundane or degrading jobs, holding their demons at bay, and squeezing what little amusement they can from life’s lemons. In this sense, Robert De Niro’s titular taxi driver is not unlike Jodie Foster’s child prostitute. This is a film about people who have suffered horrible traumas and yet refuse to talk about them. Even though we get a fairly clear portrait of Iris (Foster), we never get any sense of the gravity of the sexual violence she has undoubtedly endured. Even knowing Bickle (De Niro) is a combat veteran with insomnia, we have no idea what he actually saw or did in Vietnam.
Famously, Taxi Driver sucks its audience into Travis Bickle’s view of the world so effectively that we only realize how mentally disturbed he is relatively late in the film. By the time this is fully clear, the narrative has shifted to an explicitly first-person perspective, even incorporating voice-overs from Bickle’s journals. Though this vividly portrays the antihero’s mindset, it gives us very little sense of why he is the way he is. The sole reference to his service in the Marine Corps is in the first scene of the film, when the taxi dispatcher is interviewing him for the job. After the film establishes his inability to sleep and his habit of frequenting porno theaters, Bickle is asked about his military and driving records; he describes the latter as “real clean, like my conscience.”
Like so many things about Travis Bickle, we have no idea how to interpret this until it is too late to do us any good. De Niro’s deadpan delivery could be read as sarcasm, confession, or social ineptness. That bizarre combination is characteristic of the most disturbed criminals, and lately it is characteristic of whole internet subcultures. It is the reason why, after reading a shooter’s manifesto or watching an interview with a confessed killer, we so frequently are confused and dissatisfied. Instead of finding an explanation, we are staring into an empty hole. And nothing is cleaner than emptiness.
Most obviously, Travis Bickle is the way he is because he was unable to recover from whatever he did or whatever happened to him in the Vietnam War. Though he is resilient and capable of self-improvement, he turns these capacities to nightmarish ends. Similarly, America from the mid-seventies onward has been unable to recover from, understand, or even reasonably talk about the Vietnam War. Just like Bickle, who claims a clean conscience and moves on, America is a deeply disturbed nation that has learned the wrong lessons, if any. Like Bickle, we live in a world of corruption and injustice, yet we feel powerless to do anything about it.
And like Bickle, there are men who periodically get the bad idea that, for some reason, a random act of violence would be a meaningful stand against that world. They might link this to an ideology of white supremacy, of misogyny, or of general nihilism – and such explanations might emphasize the specific aspects of our cultural decay – but in some ways they are less meaningful than the general trend. Travis Bickle sees the world around him as damaged and diseased, but somehow he fails to realize that he suffers from the very same disease because he is a part of that world. And though Taxi Driver is undoubtedly a great work of art, I believe that, fifty years from now, it will be understood as the product of a sick culture. Even today, I cannot help but see it that way myself. Teaching it to students who have lived their whole lives knowing somebody could shoot up their school at any moment, and teaching it to women who are desperately trying to get their schools, police departments, and governments to take violence against them seriously, there is practically no other way to interpret the film.
Our nation has persisted in this state for so long that when we watch Taxi Driver, we always watch it with John Hinckley. It is a film that forces us to empathize with a homicidal sociopath. It is a film that forces us to listen to the director deliver a racist and misogynist diatribe demanding we imagine what it would look like to shoot a woman in the face and the genitals. As Travis Bickle sits quietly in the driver’s seat thinking about this, Martin Scorsese’s character tells him that he doesn’t need to respond. Obviously the viewers are just as spooked as Bickle, but in our case, we are the ones paying for this experience. We realize that, as a taxi driver and likely as a Marine before that, Bickle has probably heard these kinds of rants more times than he can count. If we watch enough movies, we have too.
Violence is a contagious disease, and news media are increasingly sensitive to this in their self-imposed limitations on coverage of mass shootings. Without denigrating whole genres of film that I admittedly love, it is worth noting that the movies are aware of this too, even if they are working at cross-purposes. A scene from Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America, in which an aspiring vigilante buys an AK-47 on the black market so he can hunt despicable media personalities, not only is modeled on the equivalent scene in Taxi Driver but directly quotes Samuel L. Jackson’s iconic performance as arms dealer Ordell Robbie in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. Of course, Travis Bickle uses handguns in his attack, but his choice of the Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum not only is suggested by Scorsese’s creepy cameo performance, it follows a consumer trend instigated by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies.
Perhaps there is no way the media can stop a wave of assassinations in politically turbulent times, but it is as though the existence of that book itself ensured its outrageous claim would become true. Bremer’s attempt on Wallace marked a turn toward the trend of spectacular gun violence as a form of fame-seeking behavior. If not quality, then quantity. Dave Cullen’s book Columbine, which critiqued the media narrative of that shooting, emphasizes that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were not misfits lashing out against bullies but rather megalomaniacs who dreamed of racking up a body count on par with Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing.
Perhaps that all-American hunger for fame is the real disease and all-American violence is merely one symptom of it. This is why Travis Bickle’s rampage at the end of Taxi Driver is in some ways less outrageous than his reception as a hero in its aftermath. For those optimistic enough to assume that multiple murders would not go unpunished, it makes more sense to read the film’s final sequence as a fantasy in Bickle’s mind. Then again, Arthur Bremer probably interpreted the success of his book as fame and social approval.
John Hinckley is not allowed to have any contact with the media, so he will never have a creepy and influential book like Arthur Bremer. But Pandora’s Box is already open. Infamy itself may be the most prevalent terrorist ideology in our country. At the beginning of every semester, I think of options for defense, shelter, and evacuation plans in case someone tries to attack my classroom. We who persist in this nation and culture keep our heads down and hope we can build something better, more hopeful, and more sane. We see that some are profiting from this disease – whether in industry, in culture, or in politics – and we hope there is some way to change the world.
But saying this already sounds like we are hoping for a rain to wash the scum away, just like Travis Bickle. When we watch – and even enjoy – a film like Taxi Driver, we know that Arthur Bremer, John Hinckley, Eric Harris, and dozens of other homicidal maniacs are sitting beside us. So we just do what we can to get by and hope to hold our collective demons at bay.
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Images from the film are screenshots from the DVD.
