Days after the elections, we watched Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver in grad school cinema studies class. It wasn’t my first time to see the film. Yet, seeing Travis (Robert De Niro), the ex-Marine turned taxi driver, trying to kill a senatorial candidate and a gang of criminals, and remembering how politics and organized crime are hardly confused in the Philippines nowadays, I find it easier to relate to him this time.
In the film, Travis enters the political party headquarters in New York and walks straight to Betsy, one of the staff in the campaign of senatorial candidate Palantine, to tell her he’d like to volunteer. It was immediately obvious to her that he was just making that as an excuse to really be able to talk to her.
Yet after asking her for a date, she says yes. How did he do it? He simply told her that she doesn’t belong to all those people in the office and that she was more real than any of them. It was crazy but the pick-up line worked.
Later, at the café, Travis tells Betsy that he was able to immediately feel a connection with her, the first time their eyes met. He knows that she too feels that way. And that mutual feeling is supposed to break through whatever façade strangers usually put up upon first encounter.
It all goes well as Betsy is attracted to Travis’ earnestness, which apparently she never encounters in his peers at the office. But Travis makes a stupid mistake. On their second date, he brings her to watch a B movie that had some pornographic parts in the cheap theater that he usually haunts. She walks out. He was just too honest for comfort.
He tries desperately to win her back, sending her flowers, making several calls. They are all in vain. Finally, he forces his way into Betsy’s office and causes a commotion as he is forcibly brought out by her officemate who also has an interest in her.
His hatred for Palantine grows as he attends his rallies and sees Betsy there sharing the stage with the politician and the rest of his spin doctors. He plans to assassinate him feeling that he is misleading people and exploiting those who work for him, like Betty.
In the meantime, he meets Iris (Jodie Foster), a child prostitute, when one night she hops into his cab trying to run away from her pimp, Sport. After his attempts to kill Palantine is foiled by security escorts, Travis tries to rescue Iris by killing her pimps in what would be one of the clumsiest (and therefore also one of the most realistic) shooting scenes in Hollywood cinema. He is wounded and goes into a coma. The film ends with him becoming an overnight hero as media play up the story of how he saved a girl from a gang of criminals.
In this ‘70s film, young De Niro already shows how he could skillfully give his character a very convincing personality, in this case, an ambiguity that is rare yet familiar. He is a misfit, a war veteran who finds it hard to adjust to ordinary life after serving in Vietnam.
But he is also portrayed as someone who deeply resents artificiality and opportunism. He realizes that the very people who are supposed to “clean up” the city are not really different from those who loiter in the streets at night to negotiate in the flesh and drug trade. Politics is just another kind of prostitution that turns people into prostitutes or pimps. It is also a kind of narcotic giving us the beautiful illusion that things are changing for the better.
Travis thus longs for a genuine human “connection” and a sense of purpose in life in order to cope with disillusionment and loneliness. With his last source of hope and inspiraton (Betsy) gone, he seems to have nowhere to go. He feels the need to do a final errand, something that would justify his worth as a person. He wages a private war against those who profit from prostituting other people: the pimps and politicians.
It’s not very clear if Taxi Driver’s happy ending is something that really happened in the world of the film or just a final dream of someone dying in a coma. It was too good, too real to be true.
There’s something equally anesthetic watching from a safe distance before the TV screen, our own Palantines being declared recently as winners in the race for the Senate. We feel numbed at the sight of it, having seen the same thing at the end of every election. Here’s a smiling face not yet showing the fangs.
We look at the mirror to ask ourselves why we allow such things to happen and what should be done to stop the narcotic illusion.
Then you hear Travis saying, “You talking to me?”