Martin Scorsese’s Dark Premonition of America
Fifty years later, Robert De Niro’s iconic loner still endures.
“Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”
The most haunting imagery in Taxi Driver — Martin Scorsese’s classic psychological drama — tends to involve firearms, whether real or imagined. In intimate moments and public confrontations, former U.S. Marine Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), now an insomniac cabbie, points real guns and L-shaped fingers at himself and others, perhaps most memorably, in a mirror. “You talkin’ to me?” De Niro improvises, aiming straight down the lens, as the audience becomes both Bickle’s victim and his violent reflection. Watching the movie today, it’s hard not to wonder if Scorsese knew he’d still be talkin’ to us with such clarity 50 years later.
After an honorable discharge, Bickle returns to the Big Apple to moonlight as a taxi driver, if only to deal with his unexplained insomnia. Gradually, we’re introduced to his state of mind in the form of rambling voiceover, as we hear him slowly narrate his diary — a signature of screenwriter Paul Schrader — in which he writes jittery prose befitting a fourth grader, about how much he detests the city’s moral rot. Before long, his misguided obsession with a pretty damsel, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), and his chance encounter with Iris (Jodie Foster), a rural teen being trafficked, begin to fuel a savior complex, leading him to train his crosshairs on anyone he deems culpable.
The Palme d’Or winner is a vital nexus in the history of on-screen vigilantes, connecting grimy forebears like Death Wish (1974) and Dirty Harry (1971) to more populist takes like Watchmen’s comic antihero Rorschach, and recent superhero films like Joker. Bickle has long been parodied in a manner that retains fleeting echoes of dramatic intent, but flattens him into broad cultural iconography; such is the fate of all popular cinema that strikes a chord. But every so often, some shocking real-world grievance — like Luigi Mangione’s alleged slaying of a health care CEO — provides chilling reminders of what has become an increasingly common mindset in the contemporary American psyche.
In the movie, Bernard Hermann’s jazzy, melodic score takes unnerving turns as often, and as suddenly, as Bickle considers violent outbursts. Perhaps he doesn’t have the default disposition of a dangerous man, but De Niro’s unpredictable performance makes it clear — like when he’s rejected by Betsy and storms into her workplace, his embarrassment curdling into fury — that a darkness lurks within him, and he’s willing to find any excuse to divert his frustrations elsewhere. Being spurned by a blonde woman leads to an unhealthy, paternalistic, Pizza Gate-esque fixation with saving Iris, a blonde teenage sex worker, by any means necessary, as well an obsession with Betsy’s employer, the presidential candidate Senator Charles Palentine (Leonard Harris). Bickle’s attempt on the senator’s life occurs for murky reasons that — like the shooting of Charlie Kirk and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump — lack a clear political worldview, in moments when it would have been so much easier and more comforting to neatly determine motive. Bickle’s failure to follow through on incoherent motives in turn catalyzes his guns-a-blazing rescue of Iris, in a sacrificial act destined to leave her traumatized. Granted, there’s no way to neatly map real-world bipartisan ideologies onto the movie’s nebulous outlooks (while Palentine is a populist, his leanings are only implied), but what remains familiar in Taxi Driver is the manner in which Bickle’s own nondescript politics shift according to mood and desire.
Travis Bickle’s misguided mission to save teenage Iris from a life of prostitution resonates even stronger today.
Bickle is, in a few words, f*cked up, but the alluring normalcy of his f*cked up-ness — in moments of downtime, and casual conversation with other cab drivers — is the perfect vigilante disguise, if an unintentional one. He lurks in plain sight, leaving us with the open-ended question of whether he slowly becomes a killer over the course of the film, or if he already was one when it began. Claims of a male loneliness epidemic are hard to ignore in contemporary readings of Taxi Driver, if only because this crisis is framed as a modern malaise, rather than something ancient with new labels. Then again, some of these descriptors (“blackpilled,” “incel,” “groyper,” etc.) also speak to more specific and fractured modern evolutions of the very things Scorsese was attempting to portray, raising the question of where exactly a person like Bickle might fit in 2026. The contemporary American psyche is one defined by political helplessness on either side of the aisle, and while this often takes far less consequential forms (Can’t undo massive budget cuts to vital infrastructure? May as well yell at trans women online), De Niro’s lone wolf lives on as its contemporary, often abstract embodiment.
Of course, this conversation can’t be broached without addressing the central tenet of such noxious modern ideologies: white supremacy. Although Bickle’s words speak to how little he cares about people’s race, his gaze is often drawn by Black pimps and drug dealers, echoing an earlier version of Paul Schrader’s screenplay where the victims of Bickle’s rampage, like Harvey Keitel’s child trafficker Sport, were predominantly African American. Perhaps this more racist version of Bickle (which perturbed Columbia Pictures enough to demand changes) would have yielded some more overt or explicit commentary on America’s racial divides. But the film, as it exists, leaves Bickle’s prejudice to the subtext and the imagination, rendering it a fascinating product of his misdirected hatred toward social inequities. In the end, he’s someone who targets the symptoms instead of the causes.
Where would Travis Bickle fit in 2026?
In Scorsese’s post-Vietnam conception of America, the need to assert dominance (and re-assert a lost or stolen masculine prowess) is at the tip of the movie’s tongue. This harkens back to some of the director’s earliest works, including and especially his nerve-shredding 1967 short The Big Shave (aka Viet ’67), in which a returning soldier calmly and stoically sheds buckets of blood during a routine shave. Even a decade before Taxi Driver, Scorsese understood something fundamental about America in the latter half of the 20th century, which also applies to the post-9/11 world: that the U.S., as a society, is frozen in a constant “post-war” state, transforming the male ego into an entity from which violence practically emanates from within, as a means of survival.
For Bickle, acquiring guns, and building mechanical devices to hide and reveal them — like a self-fashioned secret agent — are as fundamental to his self-preservation as driving to deal with sleepless nights. Neither one will cure what ails him, but they both imbue him with a sense of purpose, and a determination to enact forms of justice in a world he perceives as unjust — for no other reason than he doesn’t know how to truly fix it. In Scorsese’s America, there are few things more terrifying than a white man with a firearm and a misguided sense of virtue.
