Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Taxi Driver
1976 · Martin Scorsese · Taxi Driver on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how often Chapman shoots through the streaked windshield. (camera)
Chapman rides inside the cab with Travis, rain and neon smeared on glass, then cuts to setups that watch him from across a diner or from above.
Payoff: You get close enough to share his vision and never close enough to endorse it. In the reading: dicisign. This is what the reading calls a dicisign: an image that shows someone seeing while you feel the camera seeing him.
Look at the reds and sodium yellows in the street light. (light)
Chapman builds Times Square from neon, headlights, streetlamps and pumped steam. The streets stop reading as a place and start reading as weather inside one man.
Payoff: The city you see is not reported to you. It is filtered through Travis before it reaches you. In the reading: originary world. The reading calls this an originary world: raw appetite made into geography beneath the real 1975 New York.
Listen for the slow saxophone, and for when it stops. (sound)
Herrmann's jazz ensemble loops a loping, dissonant melody under the night driving. Scorsese pulls it away and lets sirens, traffic and cab doors take over before trouble.
Payoff: The music makes loneliness sound romantic. The silence tells you it is not.
Notice the objects Travis lays out on his apartment table. (setting)
Bare walls, junk food, guns arranged for inspection. Scorsese and Rosen keep the room plausible as a real apartment while it fills up with handled, polished things.
Payoff: The room tells you what he is becoming faster than the voice-over admits. In the reading: fetish. The reading calls the guns fetishes: ordinary objects loaded with a compulsion the man cannot name.
Watch De Niro when he is most still and polite. (performance)
De Niro plays Travis softly through the early scenes, earnest with Betsy, agreeable with the dispatcher. The threat sits in what he withholds, not in what he does.
Payoff: The performance keeps his inner life unreadable, which is why half-liking him feels uncomfortable.
Once you have seen it
Track the gap between Travis's narration and what you see. (structure)
The journal voice-over reports a lonely man cleaning up a filthy city. The images keep showing things he does not mention, and scenes stall, restart, circle back.
Payoff: The film gives you a narrator and then quietly disproves him without ever saying so.
Notice how crisply the climax cuts between Travis and Sport. (cutting)
Everything before drifts. The final sequence snaps into clean thriller intercutting, then overcranks into slow motion, holding the bodies in solemn, muted color.
Payoff: The editing recruits you into wanting the killing, using a grammar the rest of the film refuses.
Watch the camera rise above the corridors after the shooting. (camera)
The crane pulls up and surveys the aftermath from overhead, calm and godlike, after the tightest, most cramped staging in the film.
Payoff: Scorsese never settles whether that view is trauma's sudden distance or Travis imagining himself watched and forgiven.
Wait for the last flick of eyes to the rearview. (structure)
Newspaper clippings crown Travis a hero, Betsy gets into his cab, and then Herrmann swells wrong as Travis glances at the mirror.
Payoff: The film builds a redemption it does not believe, and refuses to tell you it does not.
Carry this in: You are riding inside a mind you have every reason to distrust. Keep checking the glass between him and the street.