TAXI DRIVER

Travis Bickle is cinema’s ultimate paradox: a man desperately seeking connection who completely isolates himself in plain sight. TAXI DRIVER opens with a cab emerging from a cloud of street steam like a monster from the deep, and it only gets darker from there. So much of the film has been absorbed into popular culture that it's tempting to think you already know it. Then you sit down and watch it again and realise just how unsettling it remains.

Robert De Niro plays Bickle, a lonely Vietnam veteran driving a taxi through New York City at night. Unable to sleep and increasingly disconnected from the people around him, Travis drifts through a city he experiences as chaotic, hostile, and morally decayed. What begins as alienation slowly mutates into obsession.

What strikes me most about TAXI DRIVER is how subjective it feels. We're not really watching New York. We're watching Travis's version of New York. The city becomes a reflection of his fears, frustrations, and growing paranoia. Every neon sign, rain-soaked street, and late-night encounter seems filtered through his increasingly unstable state of mind. 

It's also one of the great creative collisions in American cinema. Martin Scorsese directing. Paul Schrader writing. Bernard Herrmann composing his final score. Robert De Niro delivering one of the defining performances of the twentieth century. And of course Marcia Lucas, who's editing set the gold standard for the New Hollywood movement throughout the 70s. Somehow all of those elements came together at exactly the right moment.

What I find remarkable is that the film never ages. New York has changed, America has changed, and technology has transformed how we live. Yet Travis Bickle's isolation feels more relevant now than it did in 1976. If anything, the movie is even more uncomfortable today; a devastatingly accurate blueprint for the modern landscape of radicalized loneliness, online echo chambers, and the rise of the 'incel'.

I've seen TAXI DRIVER more times than I can count. It never gets any easier to watch. I mean that as a compliment.