Midnight Ride: Taxi Driver at 50

It starts with that score. That unmistakable, bruised-horn melancholy. Those jazzy riffs work their way into your ears the way a burned-out taxi driver works his way through the city's streets and alleys… probing, circling, never really finding a place to stop. It's the late seventies. Crime doesn't just lurk; it owns the night. And in the driver's seat, a brooding man, hands at ten and two, ponders the impossible, the unspeakable. He wants to clean it all up.

Taxi Driver turns fifty this year.

And I've been thinking about what it means for a film to hold up a mirror so grim, so unflinching, that half the audience wants to shatter the glass on sight. This isn't just a movie anniversary. It's the birthday of a ghost that never left the city. This is a midnight drive.

The Ugly Mirror

It premiered on a single screen on the East Side. February 9th, 1976. The Coronet Theatre. Martin Scorsese's harrowing drama opened there before it slowly, like a stain spreading, expanded across the country.

And from the jump, it divided people. Critically, it was not well-received by many. Too violent. Too grim. Special ire was reserved for the screenwriter, Paul Schrader. One review pinned it all on "the script." But the initial reviews were polarized—rages and raves. I keep coming back to one from Kathleen Carroll in the New York Daily News. She gave it three-and-a-half stars and wrote: "What finally makes the movie so compelling is director Martin Scorsese's scathing vision of New York as a fiery inferno of neon lights and relentlessly hostile populace."

"What finally makes the movie so compelling is director Martin Scorsese's scathing vision of New York as a fiery inferno of neon lights and relentlessly hostile populace."

It would go on to get four Oscar nods—Best Picture, De Niro, Jodie Foster, and a posthumous nomination for Bernard Herrmann's legendary score. It won none of them.

Here's the thing, though. For some of us, especially if you grew up on the East Coast in that era… the violence on screen didn't feel exaggerated. The daily news was more loaded with tragic stories—junkies, prostitutes, creeps, stalkers, gun violence—than anything a movie could dish out. The film wasn't a shock; it was a confirmation.

No, the real problem, the unsettling core, was this: what to make of Travis Bickle? Is he a rightfully burned-out guy trying to set things right? Trying to find one redeeming action to pull himself from the sin? Or is he just insane—another part of the tumor growing in the city's underbelly?

What's clear to me is this lonely, ruminating man is trying to reinvent himself. His identity depends on unleashing wrath upon characters he sees as more twisted than he. And at the center of his warped crusade: a twelve-year-old prostitute and her pimp.

Have you ever had a moment… walking through the city, maybe late at night, when every sound seems to buzz at you? Emails, texts, voicemails, people hailing cabs, whistles, arguments, pleas for change… all of it converging, pulling you in different directions until you just… snap? You become, for a moment, a misanthrope. They say the mind can't live in perpetual stress. That overload leads to neuroticism. To rumination.

That soundscape… that's the inside of Travis Bickle's mind. That's the movie.

Let's pull this ride a little toward this backstreet.

The living neurosis in the past was all around us. At least it was transparent. Nowadays, that same soul-eating corruption has receded into digital spaces. Nick Drnaso's graphic novel Sabrina shares some of these themes, four decades later. The alienation is no longer confined to the yellow cab; it's in the blue light of every screen. The difference is that Travis's rage had a target, a face, a street corner. Ours disperses into the cloud, finds no purchase, and returns to us amplified.

I finally saw it around nineteen or twenty. Probably on a grainy VHS in '96—twenty years after its release. And yet… culturally, it felt fresh. It felt dangerous. I was exposed to quotes and references to the movie—its famous scene reenacted by so many admirers long after the movie's release: Travis Bickle, rehearsing at a mirror, pointing the barrel of a piece, asking menacingly, "Are you talking to me? No? Well, you were looking at me."

So what's the big deal? It's what we mean by taking risks in fiction. The safer bet in both writing and direction would have been to look away. To take the camera out of the putrid, the ugly, to have the audience imagine the worst scenario without actually seeing it. The safer bet in writing would've been to make Travis Bickle more likable, more relatable. You know, maybe that girl was his little cousin—and she would definitely not be twelve, but maybe eighteen or nineteen. Maybe Travis is an ex-cop or maybe he's just a guy with a rightful grudge against organized crime.

The safer bet in writing would've been to make Travis Bickle more likable, more relatable. But no. That would be too glamorous.

But no. That would be too glamorous. Schrader and Scorsese went small-time. Back-alley. The kind of story the gentrified folks who'd come later would never want to shine a light on.

You tell your story. That's it. The risk? Bad reviews. Boos. This movie won the Palme d'Or at Cannes… and was booed at the same festival. When you upset the establishment that profoundly, you know you've hit a nerve.

The Hardboiled Ghost

This all makes me think about the hardboiled novel. That dark, urban tale of one man against a corrupt system. So many of these stories took place in New York or some other big, modern American city of the 20th century—that violent century. The ambiance, the tone, the black and white and liminal grey that colors this kind of story not only as depicted in film, but thematically as a work of fiction. The genre's hero is usually a detective—a Philip Marlowe, a Sam Spade—cynical, battling organized crime and a legal system just as rotten. An antihero.

It's defined as Hardboiled fiction—this dark, urban tale of one man against corruption. The protagonist is a detective who battles the violence of organized crime that flourished during Prohibition and its aftermath, while dealing with a legal system that has become as corrupt as the organized crime itself. Rendered cynical by this cycle of violence, the detectives of hardboiled fiction are often antiheroes.

Travis Bickle is no detective. But there's a connective tissue. Like a jaded detective on the verge of burnout, Travis is fed up. Worn down by what he sees on his long night drives. He sees it all. And he knows the regular rules won't work. The corruption is too entrenched. The city is corrupt and the regular rules, the by-the-book ways, won't work against a corruption so entrenched, so saturated along all social levels.

This saturation is so perverse, so insidious that even the protagonist is unaware of the extent to which it has claimed his own character, his own sanity. One scene illustrates this very well: Travis, as part of a deranged scheme to wipe out a political candidate he has set his vigilante eye on, meets a pretty blonde campaign worker. He takes her out on a date—to a movie, why not? Except he takes her to a porn movie. He's so relaxed in this venue he's got his candies and popcorn—joojoos and soda, what else would you want?

Travis is not exactly an anti-hero—he's like a delusional form of the same sickness separated itself and sets out to attack the very sickness that spawned him. He embodies a bizarre form of civil war between two halves of the same corrupt body.

What makes this story stand out is that this moral squalor is so widespread, it's claimed him, too. He's not an outsider. He's a manifestation of it. A delusional symptom that has separated itself and is now trying to attack the very disease that spawned it.

From Hardboiled to Noir – The Internal Apocalypse

But if Hardboiled is about the system, Taxi Driver is ultimately about something deeper, darker, and more internal. It's not a Hardboiled film. It's a pure, relentless Noir.

The Hardboiled detective navigates a corrupt world. The Noir protagonist is corrupted by the world. The battle isn't on the rain-slicked streets; it's in the crumbling psyche. Noir asks existential questions: What does this place do to a soul? What compromises are required just to exist here?

The Hardboiled detective navigates a corrupt world. The Noir protagonist is corrupted by the world.

Neo-noir adapts the themes and visual style of classic film noir for contemporary audiences, often incorporating vibrant colors, graphic depictions of violence or sexuality, and nonlinear narratives. It typically features conflicted antiheroes and explores themes of paranoia, alienation, and moral ambiguity.

If there is such a thing, Taxi Driver is an insight into Noir psychology. It's not about Travis cleaning up the city. It's about his mind creating a mission, a purpose, to justify its own unraveling. The city's noise becomes the noise in his head. Its moral rot becomes the fuel for his personal apocalypse.

I think of my own walks home late at night, through neighborhoods that have been scrubbed clean of the squalor Travis drove through. The old porn theaters are luxury condos. The alleys where Iris walked now have bike racks and composting bins. And yet—the feeling persists. That sense that something is deeply wrong, that the cleanliness is a facade, that the rot has merely gone underground. The difference is that Travis knew what he hated. He could name it. We exist in a state of ambient dread, our targets always just out of focus.

Which brings us to the ending. Does it end with a bang or a whimper? On the surface, it's a bang—a horrific, bloody shootout. Travis achieves his violent catharsis. He's hailed as a hero in the papers.

But look closer. It's a whimper. The final scenes are chillingly quiet. He's back in his cab. He sees Betsy again. There's no connection. No peace. Just the same empty stare, the same ticking time bomb in the rearview mirror. He didn't win. He just survived to drive another day, with the monster inside him now validated, even celebrated.

We can't help but imagine impossible alternatives for him, right? The happy ending. Travis packs up, drives west, finds peace under an open sky. But what kind of movie would that be? A lie.

This is the uncompromising contract of Noir, of this kind of fiction. There is a price to pay for the risks taken, for the descent into the abyss. You don't get to walk away clean. Travis pays in full. Not with his life, but with his soul. He's trapped forever in the hell of his own making, a hero only in the city's desperate, sick fantasy. The ultimate existential defeat.

You don't get to walk away clean. Travis pays in full. Not with his life, but with his soul.

A Wake-Up Call for Now

Which brings me to now. Fifty years later.

I'm not talking about a remake. Nah. I'm talking about the need for a new artistic affront. A new wave of fiction, of film, of art that leans hard into the noir truth of our moment.

We have to ask: are we not worse off in some ways? The alienation is digital, the corruption more systemic, the noise in our heads a 24/7 feed. The cycles feel the same, just amplified. Are we caught in the same loop where the sickness just mutates?

Literature, all the arts… they could use a dose of that Scorsese-Schrader nerve. To not look away from the internal collapse. To grapple with the lonely, ruminating, overloaded mind of today. The Travis Bickles of our era aren't just driving cabs; they're everywhere, drowning in the digital noise, feeling that same convergence, that same pull toward a despair that demands an answer.

Travis's answer was a violent down spiral. A tragic, unforgivable, noir answer. But it was an answer. One man's brutal wake-up call to a world asleep at the wheel. If you weren't paying attention to the sickness, his story made you look into the abyss—and see the abyss looking back.

Literature of the Underground—could this be an answer to the onslaught of commercialization, of market saturation in the plethora of the banal, the mediocre, the gratuitous?

As time went on, artistic expression was allowed a more free reign in terms of what it could depict—violence, sex, and so on. How do we find the sweet spot between gratuitous scenes, exploitation, and true, graphic representation that's always tethered to the deeper themes of the work?

I don't pretend to have the answer. But I know the question matters. In an era of algorithmic content, of art designed to soothe rather than disturb, of narratives that wrap up neatly in forty-two-minute episodes—where is our Taxi Driver? Who is making work that refuses to look away from the particular American madness of this moment? The loneliness that persists despite constant connection. The rage that has no clear object. The desire for meaning that curdles into something violent.

Thanks for riding along tonight. I'm wondering what kind of stories surround you. Let me know what you're seeing, what you'd like to shape into a story, maybe a photograph shot on film—even better: a photo essay exposing those seedy parts of the city, your city. Get in touch via the contact page of Cityscape Press dot com. I'd like to know what you're up to or what you'd like to hear more from me, from this kind of show. What questions you might have.

The question this fiftieth anniversary leaves us with isn't about 1976. It's about the mirrors we need now. Do we have the courage, in our art, to create new reflections this ugly, this internal, this true?

Travis Bickle wanted to clean the streets. But what he really did was show us the dirt in ourselves. Fifty years later, we're still scrubbing at the same stain. Maybe that's the point. Maybe the stain was never meant to come out. Maybe it was never the streets that needed cleaning at all.

The cab pulls away. The meter keeps running. The city waits for its next ghost.

—Robert Cavaliere