What is truly more violent, frightening and powerful: the thought, the spoken word or the gun? In Martin Scorsese’s work of art, Taxi Driver, we are introduced and follow the life of a taxi cab driver through the slums and flourishing city of New York. The driver’s name is Travis Bickle (Played by a young Robert Deniro) and he is the loneliest and most sleep deprived man in New York. There were two scenes that stuck out to me, where the thoughts (without even being narrated) and what was being said or done within the scene that really inflicted powerful color of these characters.
The first (not in a particular order) was a scene at a convenience store, where Travis stopped off to resupply for his late night shift. Upon looking at the powdered donettes, a small robbery was taking place. Here you can see Travis contemplating on reacting, after all he had just picked up a lot of weaponry from the best salesman I have ever seen. At first I thought Travis would tell him to drop the gun, and act in a formality that an officer of the law would. Next thing you know the robber turns around quickly and Travis reacted like a cold-blooded killer and blows him away.
The shot of him putting one into the robber’s neck is from a security camera like angle, which was extremely disturbing, giving you the whole picture in real-time. Seeing blood spray and items behind the counter fall over from the bullet passing through the robber’s body. Not to mention the robber’s acting of slumping over was phenomenal, I have seen one dead body in my life (outside of funerals), and that was really close to dead human reaction, or un-reaction you could say. You can see Travis realizing what had just happened, and how quickly he reacted, shocked himself. You could see that part of him wanted to pull the trigger and the other couldn’t believe he pulled the trigger. Of course there was another part of him that realized he didn’t have a registered trigger.
The second scene that was equally disturbing and powerful, and it didn’t even require gore or violence. This is probably the creepiest part of the movie or even of humanity itself. Scorsese plays the part and really captures the essence of humanity that is insanity, all just with the spoken word and the thoughts of an angry and lied to man. Travis has escorted Martin’s character to his desired location and he is giving orders to Travis. Tells Travis to keep the fare running, and pointing out the silhouette of a woman in a window and to look at her. Martin tells Travis that’s his wife, but that’s not their place. He starts talking about the awful things he would do to his cheating wife and the African American man she was with. Between Martin’s character ranting about violence and Travis sitting there not verbally responding to him or even moving an inch I was uncomfortable. It was really powerful when they showed the back of Travis’ head from Martin’s point of view, his head doesn’t move an inch and doesn’t look back at any moment look at this maniac.
Even though through most of the movie I was thinking, Travis Bickle is the craziest man in New York, Martin proves me wrong. By displaying that there is always someone crazier and possibly sicker than the sickest and craziest person you know. With that said, I had trouble agreeing with the ending, with such realistic actions and reactions throughout this movie, the ending was the most unreal. Creating a hero out of a guy who had killed four men, the consequences (which were none) wouldn’t happen in the real world. The woman, who kills her abusive husband, would still serve time in jail. Murder is murder, no matter how bad the people are and how badly they deserved it. Not saying that I agree with that.
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