This attitude upsets everything we know of the character. Could she really forget and forgive that easily? For one, Travis forgives her. Flipping the taxi meter, he absolves her completely. Of what? Did she commit any sins? For the entire duration of this sequence, starting with the overhead shot, one could assume that Travis is bleeding to death while in a state of delirium.
So as the taxi cab leaves Betsy behind on the sidewalk and the camera pans inside the car to frame the rearview mirror, perhaps Travis is about to die. This thus explains the reverberation of the xylophone heard when Travis adjusts the mirror. This would explain why Travis has disappeared from the frame.
We are left with his schizoid vision. In death, Travis has joined Jesus at the conclusion of The Last Temptation of Christ in a similar tunnel of light as described in near-death experiences. The spiritual has ultimately transcended the physical. Many religious concepts left their mark on him during his formative years, such as confession, redemption, sin, forgiveness, sacrifice, the Passion and the Crucifixion. Early in his career, many preconceived ideas on the life of Christ were put into perspective by the novel The Last Temptation in which he found a well defined structure to organize his thinking, while by the same token it tested his faith.
In truth, Scorsese is a very moral filmmaker, in spite of surface discrepancies. His genuine concern for violence, gangsters, moral and social decline and psychological pain never becomes gratuitous, because he seeks to jolt the audience and to test its capacity for forgiveness at the worst of times. The visual and emotional impact of his films is designed to put to the test as much the altruism and the faith of the public as his own doubts.
Both the fate of Travis whether he dies or not and the moral choice of the viewer Travis deserves to die or not offer a double combination, each one involving two different ends, in a kind of mathematical permutation. The viewer must now make up his own. Most of the film critics must have opted for the second alternative, which could explain their negative reaction to Taxi Driver.
Their moral sense told them that Travis should have died to assume the consequence of his violent actions. They therefore found the ending unbelievable and unsatisfying. From a moral standpoint, the third and fourth alternatives are then the most satisfying, the fourth one proving the most deeply Christian: the punishment absolves the sinner, but since he was forgiven his death saddens.
Did Scorsese forgive Travis? Being so driven by Catholic principles deeply rooted in his psychological makeup, could it be possible that unconsciously Scorsese let Travis die, as the previous demonstration tends to prove? This hypothesis is fascinating, for it taps directly into the unconscious creative instincts of the auteur. Both Scorsese and Robert De Niro worked enormously in shaping the script into final form.
But it is amazing that both Schrader and Scorsese always publicly promoted the literal ending in which Travis, if he is not really cured, lives on. If then, even for them, Travis survives, why are there all those clues pointing to the contrary? If you feel like it, do it. Scorsese decided to shoot it in front of the mirror and to frame only the mirror.
The scene was then edited by Tom Wolfe, one of three editors supervised by Marcia Lucas. Should we deduce that Scorsese lost control over this crucial scene, that he was unaware of the fantastic impact of the ending, that the artistic outcome of his film was totally lost on him? One must not forget the obvious, that in the best circumstances, the person who decides what finally goes into a film or not is the director. All that anger, all the rage that was in the character that you hoped to work out for yourself in making the film stays with you!
There is certainly a part of the unconscious at work in making a film, as in all forms of artistic creation. However, following Taxi Driver , Scorsese continued to explore this ambiguous narrative trait in his work, offering both his characters and the public a last temptation. As early as New York, New York in its original release length of minutes, we find hints of a second ending. In this case, the reality upstaged the fantasy. This motif of the second ending becomes clearly defined in The King of Comedy Rupert forces the producers to let him appear on the show to deliver the opening monologue.
After the taping of the show, Rupert is taken away by police officers who permit him to watch the show in a bar with his would-be girlfriend. Following the broadcast of the entire delivery, there is a cut and we find ourselves watching a news report on tv telling us by means of a voice-over what happened to Rupert.
We learn that 87 millions viewers saw him on the show. A cardboard cut-out of a full-size Rupert is features in a library display of his book. Lastly, Rupert has his own talkshow and a voice-over still the same voice introduces him.
As he appears, the camera starting from the back of the audience moves up to frame him in medium close-up while he salutes the audience.
As with Taxi Driver , this is a subversive view of the typical Hollywood happy ending. It is also an extremely critical and perverse view of the American Dream.
But once again something is afoot. How could he achieve such a level of fame when he is not even funny, much less talented? In his basement, Rupert has made cardboard cut-outs of his favorite performers Liza Minnelli amongst them, supreme irony , and plays out guest appearances with them.
He fantasizes all the time about talking, lunching, having fun with Jerry Langford. He hears the crowd applauding and laughing at his dull jokes, although he is only staring at a wall paper audience. Rupert envisions himself becoming famous, as much as Travis sees himself becoming an avenger. And so at the end Rupert is famous. But the cardboard cut outs at the library are the same as his. He took over the Jerry Langford show, however unlikely.
Whether he is in prison or in an asylum, Rupert has made his dream a reality. His temptation for success and the American Dream overpowered him. In The King of Comedy , the dream upstaged the reality. The dreamed realities of both Rupert Pupkin and Travis Bickle belong together because they both modified them from the inside out. But in the case of Paul Hackett Griffin Dunne , the sacrificed hero of After Hours , his reality will be shattered from the outside in.
Scorsese masterfully demonstrates how to personalize a project on which you are a hired hand. He accepted the task when Paramount stepped out of his first attempt to produce The Last Temptation of Christ in All the tension, anger and anguish suffered by Scorsese on this failed deal got channeled into After Hours. As soon as he leaves, things go wrong. Paul ends up in a basement where a lonely artist Verna Bloom who played Mary mother of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ covers him completely with plastered paper.
Paul becomes a plastered human crucifix, with his hands stuck to his forehead and an expression of terror on his face. He is stolen by the real thieves and put into the back of a van. As the van rides away at the same lunatic speed as the previous taxi cab, the doors open and the statue breaks into pieces on the pavement. Paul is unhurt. He gets up and finds himself in front of the office building where he works as a computer analyst. He gets up, enters the building and slumps down into his chair, eyes gazing blankly as the camera rushes around him completing several elliptical circles.
Visually, Scorsese shoots from above to remind the audience that they're looking down on Travis and the other victims who lie in the hell they created.
An angelic figure in white, Iris, is the lone survivor, and she's framed next to religious imagery. On the left side of the frame: the profane. On the right side of the frame: the sacred. In the middle: Travis — a fusion of both Caravaggian concepts. To reinforce the idea that Travis dies in Taxi Driver , Scorsese's camera slowly leaves the room while the police assess the scene, frozen in shock. The camera ultimately settles in the street to show that a giant mess still exists.
The implication: Travis didn't clean up anything but instead contributed to the filth. Still, Taxi Driver leaves it up to the audience to interpret the rest of the film. Was Travis just in his actions? Or did Travis' delusional mind and moral righteousness get the best of him? Essentially, Scorsese provides the audience with a Caravaggian ending.
Travis can be viewed as a sacred figure who lives on. Or he can be viewed as a profane murderer who's stuck in purgatory, or hell. Taxi Driver's epilogue makes it seems like Travis survived and became a New York City hero for saving young Iris, whose father reads a thank-you letter through voiceover narration. What is, perhaps, more disturbing than Bickle's temporary vigilante insanity, is the fact that he does make a difference.
Where society including society's faith in crusading politicians like Palantine fails to help Iris, Bickle succeeds. In this sense, the film stands as a warning. My interpretation of the conversation was that by the end of it Palentine probably saw Bickle as a bit of a zealous crank.
I'm less confident of Bickle's reaction at that point--he tends to put on a facade, as mentioned--but I would imagine this interaction was a piece of the equation that led to Bickle targeting Palentine, perhaps seeing him as a perpetuation of a corrupt society that needed "cleanining up".
I believe that after Bickle buys all of the guns, he's looking for opportunities to use them. Ideologically, he wants to "clean things up", but I think he's also just looking for an outlet of some kind. He picks the politician because he's met him, because he has access to him, because he's a convenient scapegoat as probably the most powerful person Bickle has access to.
Guns are the tool he's chosen to make a difference, and he's got his eye open for ways to use the gun, as shown in the convenience store robbery. After failing with the politician, he moves on to the pimp.
Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Betsy gets out of the cab and asks how much she owes him. Travis smiles and drives off wordlessly, not charging her anything.
No, in order to secure the film an R rating, Martin Scorsese had to desaturate the colour of the film for the shootout scene so the blood does not look as graphic. Scorsese has admitted he actually liked the desaturated result better than the original, but the film's cinematographer, Michael Chapman, did not. The original negatives for the scene no longer exist, as they deteriorated over the years.
Scorsese himself has commented that it was meant to signal to the audience that Travis could have a fit of rage again at any point in the future and that he is not the glorious hero the newspapers make him out to be. The sound itself was originally a cymbal clash. Viewers are mixed in their answer to this question. Other viewers see Travis as a sociopath alienated from society, a villain whose actions being interpreted as heroism was simply a lucky break.
Scorsese is the master of presenting anti-hero characters, people who do wrong things for right reasons, at least as they see it! Travis likely was under the assumption that all couples went to the porno theater. When Betsy is hesitant about going in Travis says "It's ok, I see couples go here all the time". This scene also illustrates how hard it is for Travis to fit in with society because he has absolutely no idea how normal people interact and had to go off of his experience seeing couples as the theater.
This scene is also an illustration of Travis attempting to insert the sexual dynamic into his relationship with Betsy, but given Travis's social ineptitude, he may have been hoping a racy movie would help his chances in sealing the deal with Betsy. You can tell that Travis is legitimately confused and regretful after seeing Betsy's reaction, so although Travis thought bringing Betsy to the theater was a good idea, it did not work out in his favor.
Policing at the time when this was set is different from policing today. The fact that it was only pimps and lowlifes that were killed would be enough for most people to see the actions as just and for the police to spin a self-defence motive and not bother bringing any charges. Sign In. Taxi Driver Jump to: FAQs 11 Spoilers 3. What is 'Taxi Driver' about? Is 'Taxi Driver' based on a book? What does the cab personnel officer mean by "break my chops" and ''take it on the arches'?
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