The eyes of a killer: Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver
Chris Forrester contemplates a handful of works by Paul Schrader, which reveal a heavy debt to filmmaker Robert Bresson as they excavate the isolation, morality, and violence of their male protagonists.
If you’re more than passingly acquainted with the films of Paul Schrader, this is likely a familiar image to you: a man and a woman in a prison setting, separated by a physical barrier, and touching hands. It varies from occurrence to occurrence — here the divider is the glass of a cell (American Gigolo, 1980; The Card Counter, 2021), there it’s the table in a visitation room (Light Sleeper, 1992) — and occasionally its essence recurs in other forms, such as pairs of people in a kind of physical union that exudes the same lonely desperation (First Reformed, 2017; Master Gardener, 2022). Taken quite directly from the ending of Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), such moments epitomize the almost spiritual emotional power of a filmmaking style Schrader himself wrote of in Transcendental Style in Film (below), and punctuate Schrader’s own stories of transcendence: sagas of lonely men seeking absolution within the desolate shells of their own lives.
“In 1971, struggling with the concept of transcendental style, I sought to understand how the distancing devices used by these directors could create an alternate film reality — a transcendent one. I wrote that they created disparity, which I defined as ‘an actual or potential disunity between man and his environment,’ ‘a growing crack in the dull surface of everyday reality.’ By delaying edits, not moving the camera, forswearing music cues, not employing coverage, and heightening the mundane, transcendental style creates a sense of unease the viewer must resolve. The film-maker assists the viewer’s impulse for resolution by the use of a Decisive Moment, an unexpected image or act, which then results in a stasis, an acceptance of parallel reality — transcendence.”
Schrader has himself made five films that might be seen as Pickpockets: American Gigolo, about an escort caught up in a political conspiracy; Light Sleeper, about a recovered addict-turned-contemplative drug dealer; First Reformed, about a pastor radicalized by the climate crisis; The Card Counter, about a gambler reckoning with his involvement in Abu Ghraib; and Master Gardener, about a horticulturist with a dark past. Including screenwriter credits, we can note a few more: Rolling Thunder (Flynn, 1977); Bringing Out the Dead (Scorsese, 1999); and, of greatest significance, Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976).
The first of Schrader’s myriad Variations on a Theme reworkings of Pickpocket’s tale of “a man in his room, and his room,” it prefigures the essential components and the more malleable ones: a lonely, tortured man, his room, his diary, a force of radicalization and the looming, violent urges it provokes and, variably, the sociopolitical context within which they all fit. Taxi Driver hardly needs introduction, but for the sake of giving specificity to those components, the man is insomniac Vietnam vet Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro, in a performance of career-defining menace), whose loneliness courses through nights spent ferrying passengers about New York and fantasizing about wiping “the scum” of urban decay off the streets.
Subsequent reworkings change this figure and his worldly contexts — alternately he’s an outsider swept into the shady backroom dealings of the political apparatus, a tranquil witness to further urban decay, a self-flagellating healthcare worker chasing the high of playing God, a solitary spiritual guide in an increasingly corporatized faith, a lonely drifter passing through nondescript hotel rooms and casinos, a modest presence at a dowager’s grand estate — but a sense of spiritual loneliness is omnipresent. In spite of only one of these films’ outwardly faith-related concerns, God’s absence looms large in many of them.
Of equal importance is the radicalization of this figure. Compounded by the character’s spiritual alienation, his socio-political milieu becomes a catalyst for violence — the impact of which is often shrouded in moral grayness. Unable to carry out a planned political assassination, Travis instead hunts down a child sex trafficker and unleashes his brutal impulses to the tune of a dead pimp and mafioso and a child freed from scarring exploitation (Jodie Foster); never caught for his assassination attempt, he is praised as a heroic vigilante. Likewise, an enraged Julian pushes the orchestrator of a plot to frame him from a balcony and is jailed with no proof of the setup (American Gigolo), LeTour shoots the drug dealer and henchmen responsible for the staged accident that killed his ex-wife Marianne (Light Sleeper), Reverend Toller prepares to detonate a suicide vest to kill an industrialist responsible for funding a nearby megachurch (First Reformed), Tell subjects his former Abu Ghraib superior to methods of violent “enhanced interrogation” he learned as part of the state torture apparatus (The Card Counter), and Roth breaks the legs of the drug dealer who is stalking his apprentice and romantic interest (Master Gardener).
Also taken from Bresson is another component of Schrader’s “lonely man” films previously established but not parsed: the room, which is, to Schrader, also the cell. Many of the previously discussed characters do find themselves imprisoned at the end of their respective films, but the room and the cell are the same (and separate from incarceration) in that they are prisons of social and spiritual isolation. It’s in these cells that Schrader’s protagonists sink into alienation and radicalization, and often, too, that they diarize. Like Pickpocket’s Michel, Schrader’s lonely men muse to themselves and God on paper, enabling their respective films an interiority that doesn’t interfere with their tones of emotional quietude.
That tone is encapsulated in the spare formal style of Schrader’s directorial approach (and a key distinguishing feature between the films he directed and those he only scribed) and channels the films he wrote of in Transcendental Style in Film. Taking from Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer (who gave the original edition of his book its primary subjects), Schrader employs austere camerawork, restrained and understated acting styles, and an objective editing scheme; as he wrote, “The form is the operative element — it ‘does the work.’” And like those filmmakers, Schrader uses these stylistic components to heighten one’s sense of the spiritual in his works. The films that he directed in the Bressonian tradition take cues from his muse’s subjects and forms: Schrader’s own assertion that they “deal with the questions of freedom and imprisonment, or, in theological terms, of free will and predestination” could be ascribed as easily to his own works as to Bresson’s.
Taxi Driver, then, is, for all its narrative and thematic resonance with Schrader’s own interpretations of his “lonely man” scripts, a markedly different take on the material that situates its character and style within the milieu of ’70s New York. And if it loses anything in the translation from transcendental-style scaffolding to grimy nighttime urban tone poem, it gains a good deal as well. Schrader’s idea for the screenplay was to take the existentially malaised antihero of Pickpocket and transplant him into an American context — as a character in his screenplay for The Yakuza (1974) observes, “When a Japanese cracks up, he’ll close the window and kill himself; when an American cracks up, he’ll open the window and kill somebody else” — and Scorsese, with his myriad cinephilic influences, proved the right man for the job. There’s an elegant purity to Schrader’s own adaptations of his works, but a good deal of Taxi Driver’s staying power blossoms from its moody sense of place and vacillating object/subjectivity: the enveloping neon gloom of its nighttime cityscapes, the jazzy hum of Bernard Herrmann’s score, the first glimpse of the then-fledgling Scorsese/De Niro partnership’s true potential. That it left Schrader’s urge to Americanize Pickpocket not quite yet fulfilled was only for the better.
Taxi Driver screens at IU Cinema on June 21 at 4pm as part of Critics’ Pics: Selections from AFI and Sight & Sound (it placed 47th in AFI’s “100 Years… 100 Movies” list and 29th in Sight and Sound‘s 2022 “The Greatest Films of All Time” poll).