Taxi Driver
Join now to read essay Taxi Driver
The technique of slow motion is familiar to audiences, who usually see it in romantic scenes, or scenes in which regret and melancholy are expressed–or sometimes in scenes where a catastrophe looms, and cannot be avoided. But Scorsese was finding a personal use for it, a way to suggest a subjective state in a POV shot. And in scenes in a cab drivers diner, he uses closeups of observed details to show how Traviss attention is apart from the conversation, is zeroing in on a black who might be a pimp. One of the hardest things for a director to do is to suggest a characters interior state without using dialog; one of Scorseses greatest achievements in “Taxi Driver” is to take us inside Travis Bickles point of view.
There has been much discussion about the ending, in which we see newspaper clippings about Travis “heroism,” and then Betsy gets into his cab and seems to give him admiration instead of her earlier disgust. Is this a fantasy scene? Did Travis survive the shoot-out?