Taxi Driver - the fickle tides of chance

Started the new year in film by ticking off another entry from the list of classic films my girlfriend has never seen.  Being made over 40 years ago now, it is hardly a surprise that only those with a keen interest in film have sought it out.  Robert De Niro's performance was a cultural touchstone for years, but the sheer number of films (and indeed films starring De Niro) that exist for people to consume these days means that Taxi Driver has fallen off the cultural radar.  You lookin' at me? might still be a line that trips off the tongue of the Millennial on the street, but the reason why they know it is slowly being lost in time.  It's not too much of a surprise - after all 43 years is a long time.  Consider for a moment that 43 years before Taxi Driver was made, cinema was only just out of the silent era.

The story told in Taxi Driver remains as powerful now as it ever was.  Robert De Niro is peerless as Travis Bickle - a character who is cipher for a world gone wrong in so many respects.  He is a war veteran who should be respected and offered a path in society.  Instead he is offered a view of the dregs of society, a vision of the world at its lowest, of people acting without fear of consequence in a place where no one would notice the bitterest of crimes, he is a taxi driver in New York circa 1976.  Bickle is introduced without fanfare, without background and without detailed regard for his drive in life other than simply to be able to be.  One wonders if he was nearly a nameless character in a script full of hollow people drifting through these mean streets.  He struggles to sleep and struggles to connect in a world that seems intent on ruining itself through a combination of vice and disregard for others.

Bickle's attempts to connect with Betsy (Cybill Sheppard) are initially naive and sweet, and then eventually coloured by the world around him.  He has come to assume that the scummy world of cheap blue flicks in dingy cinemas must be 'normal', otherwise why would everyone tolerate such things.  The fact that Betsy recoils at this world baffles him.  When Bickle meets the 12 year old Iris (Jodie Foster) he recoils at her scant disregard for being pimped out on New York's streets - even Bickle knows this is a step too far.  He knows he needs to do something to right these wrongs, but what difference can one man on a dark street really make?

Never lurking far from the story of society gone terribly wrong, the film's central theme is chance and the fickle fates that can turn us into heroes or villains, princes or paupers.  Bickle was born into working class drudgery and insomnia rather than into suburbia and opportunity - that's how the cosmic dice rolled.  Bickle is nearly a motiveless murderer, nearly a 1970's Lee Harvey Oswald; instead he is lauded a hero and given a chance at redemption - that's how the cosmic dice rolled.  Anyone could be Travis Bickle.  And while we live in a world insistent on condemning those who's luck wasn't there at life's crucial moments, we continue risking sending those people down a path in which they will do anything (or commit any atrocity) to be noticed.

Taxi Driver remains one of the greatest films ever made.