Imagine the pressure of being “God’s lonely man.” That’s how Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), riffing on Thomas Wolfe, describes himself in Taxi Driver, an exploration of a male mind that’s broken in a particularly American way. During his nightime shift on the streets of New York City, where he passes drug dealers, prostitues, and the like, Bickle seethingly predicts that “some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.” By the end of the film—military jacket adorned, head shaved, multiple guns procured—he has become the rain. Director Martin Scorsese, in dramatizing the punishing theology of Paul Schrader’s script, stares Bickle directly in the eyes, then gets swallowed by the gaze. Kudos also to Michael Chapman’s lurid cinematography and Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho-inflected, split-personality score. For all its filmmaking artistry, however, Taxi Driver’s dent in the pop-culture consciousness is mostly due to De Niro. Every fiber of Bickle’s being—even his smile—is assaultive, yet the performance is also pathetic enough to capture the chasm of loneliness opening beneath Bickle’s cowboy boots. God’s only man is what Travis means.
