To Control or Not to Control: Travis Bickle’s Burden in Taxi Driver

        The 1976 film Taxi Driver by director Martin Scorsese centers around the mentally deteriorating Travis Bickle and his attempt to control the city and the people around him. Travis’ conflict with control is the result of struggling between self-direction and controlling personal fate and a predetermined life that cannot be escaped. This issue with control is vital to the film, because where most people would see Travis as a war-torn, antihero, I see Travis as the product of overbearing forces of control and desire to design his own fate. It is his lack of control and discovery of this deficiency that drives Travis to the downhill spiral of violence and break from reality. Relating Travis to other characters within the film such as the Wizard and Iris, who provide Travis with insight on their own ideas of destiny and control over it, I will better construct the proposed idea of Travis’ burden as the tension between control of one’s fate and predetermined destiny/fate.

            The film follows Travis’ as he moves towards controlled destiny while he attempts to improve his life with getting a job as a taxi driver, finding a girl, and “cleaning up” the city, but when things don’t go as planned, Travis slips into a dark realization that things are out of his hands. Travis wishes to supplement his loneliness and lack of direction by redirecting his life for what he believes is a positive, but after Betsy rejects his advances and Iris ignores his efforts to rescue her, Travis flips the switch and buckles up for a ride of negativity. The scene that captures the change of direction in both Travis and the film itself starts at [1:32:15-1:33:56]. In the shooting script of Taxi Driver, Paul Schrader titles this section “God’s Lonely Man,” which directly reflects Travis’ self-identification as the victim of predestinated fate.

            The scene opens with the sound of shots and immediately the audience is introduced to Travis at the firing range. The scene then moves into Travis’ apartment where we find Travis writing a note and attaching money to the message within the note. A close-up indicates that the letter is to Iris and the money is supposed to be enough for her trip. The letter is dismal and desperate with the message:

            “Dear Iris,

            This money should be enough for your trip. By the time you read this I will be dead.

            Travis.”

A voiceover then chimes in as Travis claims “My whole life has pointed in one direction. I see now. There never has been any choice for me.” Following Travis burning flowers in his apartment and writing his last entry, the camera moves outside to Palantine’s campaign event. By showing the crowd of people and Palantine’s arrival, the film foreshadows direction Travis is about to take. It is clear that Travis believes that since he cannot control his own fate, he has only one choice: kill presidential candidate Charles Palantine and then himself. Following the scene, Travis is seen placing the envelope with Iris’ letter and money in the mailbox as he walks through his visibly deteriorating apartment building. I believe the apartment building, Travis’ home, correlates to Travis’ own deterioration and breakdown.

            Travis’ need to control his life and the people and things associated with him ultimately becomes the trigger for the dissolution of his character and mental state. It is through the lack of control of his fate that Travis’ violent nature and motives surfaces, as does the films own violent subtext becomes evident. I believe that without the understanding of Travis’ realization, as irrational as it may be, the film’s final moments would not hold the weight that they do and Travis will appear as the antihero, “vigilante” that many viewers have come to identify him as, rather than the result of slipping control.