The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Martin Scorsese · a film · 1976 · from a screenplay by Paul Schrader
Mode
Character study as vigilante film; diary, city film and captivity tale turned against their own reward
Mythos
The captivity narrative, rescuer and captor of one kind; the purifying rain; the knight between an angel and a child
Phase
One man’s nights in eight movements, from his hiring to the epilogue; the diary runs to the eve of the shootout, falls silent through it, and gives way to another voice
Presentation
Feature film in colour; Michael Chapman’s camera, Bernard Herrmann’s last score, the diary given as voice-over; one release version, its climax desaturated
Register
From a courtship over coffee to a massacre on a staircase; a saxophone for the longing, a snare and brass for the menace
Scale
One man, one city, mostly at night
Governing Proposition
An ex-Marine who cannot sleep drives a cab through Manhattan at night and keeps a diary of his disgust. He courts a woman who refuses him, prepares to shoot the candidate she works for, fails, and kills the pimp of a child prostitute instead, and the press and the girl’s parents call him a hero. The wager of the film is that the lonely man’s longing for purity and his violence are one appetite, that nothing but the target separates the assassin from the rescuer, and that a film made wholly from inside such a man can show it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a cab. A Checker slides out of white steam in slow motion, to a snare drum and low brass, and the picture cuts to a pair of eyes in close-up, washed in red and blue light from the street. Then an office, where a young man asks for work driving a cab. He is an ex-Marine, he cannot sleep, and he will take nights, anywhere, any time. The personnel officer, played by Joe Spinell, hires him. Before the story has begun, the film has named its two subjects: a city seen through a windshield, and the eyes doing the seeing.
The young man is Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, and he keeps a diary, which the film gives as his voice over the pictures. He drives the night shift through Times Square and 42nd Street, spends his hours off in the porno theatres, and writes down what he sees from the front seat. “All the animals come out at night,” the diary says, and it lists them. Then it prays: “Someday a real rain will come.” Between fares he sits with the other drivers in an all-night café. The diary runs almost the length of the film, and it is the film’s first form: a man telling himself who he is, in sentences that do not match the places he goes.
The screenplay is by Paul Schrader, who was twenty-nine when the film opened; Martin Scorsese, who directed it for Columbia Pictures, was thirty-three, and De Niro thirty-two. Michael Chapman photographed it. Bernard Herrmann wrote the score, his last: he died on 24 December 1975, forty-six days before the film opened on 8 February 1976, and it is dedicated to his memory. The music is split from the first minutes, a sultry saxophone theme for what Travis longs for and the drum and brass for what he will do, and the two are never reconciled. What the opening settles is the method. The film will stay with Travis, see what he sees and hear what he tells himself, and it will leave the viewer inside a perception the viewer cannot share.
Movement II
Through the window of a campaign office he sees a woman working for Charles Palantine, who is running for president. She is Betsy, played by Cybill Shepherd, and the film gives her entrance in slow motion through the crowd, dressed in white, while the diary calls her an angel. Inside, she trades jokes with a colleague, Tom, played by Albert Brooks, and Travis watches some of it from the street. Then he walks in and asks her out. Over coffee he tells her that she is lonely, which is what he is, and she is curious enough to see him again.
He buys her a record. He takes her to a porno film, and she walks out. He telephones her, and while he pleads, the camera tracks away from him and holds on an empty corridor, as if it could not bear to watch him be refused. When he goes to the office to confront her, he is thrown out. The courtship has failed, and in failing it has shown the film’s law in small: Travis cannot read the world he wants to enter, and the one gesture he knows how to make toward a woman is to take her where he goes alone.
Between these scenes the film sets its other woman. One night a girl gets into the back of the cab and is pulled out again by a pimp, Sport, played by Harvey Keitel, who leaves a crumpled twenty-dollar bill on the front seat. The girl is Iris, played by Jodie Foster, who was thirteen when the film opened. Another night Palantine himself rides in the back seat. The doubled structure is now laid out: a woman approached and lost, a girl seen and taken away, and a candidate who has sat a few feet from the man who will come for him.
Movement III
A passenger, played by Scorsese himself, sits in the back of the stopped cab watching a lit window, where his wife’s silhouette shows. He tells Travis what a .44 Magnum would do to her. It is the first time Travis hears his own violence spoken by someone else, and the gun comes after it. At the drivers’ table a tablet fizzes in a glass of water, held in close-up until it fills the frame, while the talk goes on around a man who has stopped hearing it. Travis turns to an older driver, the Wizard, played by Peter Boyle, who tells him that a man becomes his job. It is the one counsel he receives, and it is no use to him.
Andy, a salesman played by Steven Prince, lays his guns out on the bed of a hotel room, and Travis sights down a barrel out of the window. The sale is cut in jumps. Then the training, in fragments: a rig built to slide a pistol from his sleeve into his hand, and the rehearsal in front of the mirror in his room. “You talkin’ to me?” he asks his reflection, and asks again. The line has passed into common speech; in the film it is a man with no one to talk to making an opponent of himself, and assembling, in front of the camera, the person he means to become.
The first use comes unplanned. In a bodega he walks in on a hold-up and shoots the robber, and the city absorbs it; nothing follows for him. The film does not pause on the shooting, and that is its point. The violence Travis has been rehearsing has a place waiting for it in the city, and it can be spent on anyone. What the next two movements decide is only where it will be spent.
Movement IV
He goes looking for Iris. He finds Sport on the street, pays him, and is taken up to a room where she waits; he has not come for what she is sold for. The next day they have breakfast in a diner. The scene is long and flat, two people who cannot quite hear each other, and it earns its length: the child who is to be saved has her own view of her life, and Travis cannot read it any better than he read Betsy.
He writes to his parents, a letter of lies. The film then gives the one scene from which Travis is wholly absent: Sport dancing with Iris in a room, holding her close. Travis shaves his head into a Mohawk and goes to a Palantine rally, where he stands in the crowd smiling at a Secret Service agent, and when the agent moves he runs. The diary makes its last turn, a farewell: “Here is a man who would not take it anymore.” The assassin has failed, and the man and the weapons are still looking for a target.
He drives to the East Village. Sport is on the stoop, and Travis shoots him. Then he goes up the stairs, wounded, from landing to room, until the men who hold Iris are dead, and on a couch beside her he puts the gun to his own head and finds it empty, and raises a bloodied finger to his temple instead. The diary is silent through all of it: the narrator who has told us for the whole film who he is says nothing at the moment he acts. Then the camera rises and passes slowly over the bodies and the stairs, and out of the building to the street. The colour of the scene was desaturated before release, and the change serves it.
Movement V
The epilogue begins on a wall of newspaper clippings. Travis has lived, and the papers have made him a hero. Over the clippings a letter from Iris’s parents is read, thanking him, and the voice is her father’s, the first voice over the pictures that is not Travis’s. The drivers greet him back at work. Then Betsy gets into his cab. He drives her home, will not take her fare, and drives off. In the last shot his eyes go to the rear-view mirror, the image jolts, and the film ends.
The film permits two readings of the ending and keeps both. Read as real, the society honours the act it would have hanged him for: had the candidate fallen he would be an assassin, and because the target was a pimp he is a hero, though nothing in him has changed. Read as the fantasy of a dying man, the film shows the fantasy itself, that the lonely man’s dream is to be thanked for killing. Either way something is laid open. A film made wholly from one man’s perception cannot certify that its last scenes are not that perception, and it does not try.
It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May 1976, and it was nominated for four Academy Awards, for the picture, for De Niro, for Foster and for Herrmann’s score, and won none. It had taken the vigilante picture of Dirty Harry and Death Wish and turned it against its own reward, and built its rescue on the frame of Ford’s The Searchers, rescuer and captor both in war paint. Its heirs run through fifty years, from Schrader’s own solitary men to Joker. Five years after it opened, John Hinckley’s attempt on President Reagan was made in its image, and the old charge, that the film was excited by what it showed, was raised again. The film answers it only by its structure: the man in the mirror at the end is the man at the rally, and only the target was different.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the structure and the cut. All eight movements are required, and the doubling makes them so: the courtship of Betsy is the failed approach that the rescue of Iris answers, and the rally is the act the massacre replaces. Much that looks removable is load-bearing. The passenger played by Scorsese, describing what a .44 Magnum would do to his wife, gives Travis his own violence in another man’s mouth, and the gun purchase follows. The Wizard’s talk of a man becoming his job is the one counsel Travis receives, and it is useless. What gives is weighed: the office comedy between Tom and Betsy runs past its function, the drivers’ café scenes repeat, and the diary sometimes says what the picture has shown.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: the lonely man’s longing for purity and his violence are one appetite, and its target is nearly arbitrary. Travis prepares to shoot a presidential candidate, fails, and kills a pimp instead. The second act makes him a hero to the press and to the girl’s parents; the first would have made him an assassin. Nothing in him distinguishes them. Only the target does, and the society’s verdict follows the target. It held: five years after release, John Hinckley’s attempt on President Reagan was made in the film’s image. Held below the top because much of the force is the city as Travis feels it, a mood rather than a meaning, and the ending’s two readings blur the statement, though each keeps it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is dreadful, not exalted, and it recurs: the cab sliding out of white steam in slow motion over Herrmann’s snare and brass, and Travis’s eyes washed in red and blue light; Betsy coming through the crowd in slow motion; the camera tracking away from Travis on the telephone to hold on an empty corridor while he is refused; a tablet fizzing in a glass at the drivers’ table until it is the whole world; the mirror; and the overhead shot after the shootout, passing slowly above the bodies and out to the street. Held at the figure by the middle stretch: the courtship and the breakfast with Iris are flat by design, the summits gather at the two ends, and only the overhead shot reaches the very top.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The myth is built, not cited. Its load-bearing structure is the American captivity narrative: a lone man of violence rescues a girl held by a savage, and the rescue is a massacre. The third act is that structure, the structure of Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Sport’s long hair and the Mohawk Travis cuts before the rally put war paint on both men; rescuer and captor are of one kind, as in Ford. Around it the purification myth is set up and paid, the diary’s prayer for a real rain answered by the shootout, and the knight’s two ladies are built too, Betsy in white and the child to be saved. Travis is never a type. Held below the top because the myth is built to be argued with.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance was the American vigilante and crime film at its commercial height, Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974). The film turns it inside out: the vigilante is a psychotic who first meant to shoot a candidate, the audience is held in his perception, and the ending pays him the genre’s reward, public honour, as an indictment. Into a studio picture it brought the means of European art cinema: Bresson’s diary voice and solitary man, the subject of Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film (1972), and Godard’s close-ups of objects. The stake was real but small in money. Held below the gate because the swerve was prepared: by Scorsese’s own Mean Streets (1973), by the New Hollywood antihero, and by Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), which had already put audiences inside a killer’s perception.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is how the world looks from inside Travis. The form is that perception: the windshield as frame, the rear-view mirror holding his eyes, slow motion where he fixes on something, and a diary voice that says what he thinks he is. Herrmann’s score is split the same way, a saxophone for the longing and a drum and brass figure for the menace, never reconciled. The diary falls silent at the shootout: the narrator stops narrating when he acts. A film made wholly of one man’s perception cannot certify that its last scenes are not that perception, so the epilogue’s doubt is the form’s own. Held below the top where the form opens, in the scenes Travis does not witness.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and there are fifty years of it. The questions stay open: whether the epilogue is real or a dying man’s fantasy, which the film permits both ways; whether it criticises its violence or is excited by it, a charge raised at release and again after Hinckley; race, in Travis’s stares at black men and a passenger’s slur, still read in opposed ways; and the political reading, revived by later lone attackers and by Joker (2019). The formal depth yields as well: the three mirrors, the score’s two halves, the doubled rescue. Held at the figure because much of the yield is the ending’s ambiguity and the ethics of identification, a smaller set of questions than the deepest films keep open.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Released in 1976, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film made the first-person study of a dangerous solitary a mainstream American form, and fused Bresson’s austerity to a genre film’s violence. It stands below the reach because the swerve was prepared. The reach outside cinema, in Hinckley, is a grim proof of force, but not the field moved, and it is not weighed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Schrader’s own line of solitary men, from American Gigolo (1980) and Light Sleeper (1992) to First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021); Scorsese and De Niro’s The King of Comedy (1982), its comic twin; Nightcrawler (2014) and You Were Never Really Here (2017); Joker (2019), built openly on both, with De Niro in it; and the line at the mirror, in common speech.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across fifty years of continuous exhibition, restoration and re-release. The surface is fixed to its moment more than most: Times Square and 42nd Street before their clearance, the porno theatres, the Checker cab, the campaign of 1972 in all but name. That surface is now a period document, and part of the survival is by conversion, since the city of the film is gone and is watched as a record. But what makes the work is not the city. It is the man in the room, and he has outlived it: the film reads now as a portrait of a figure later decades named and feared. Herrmann’s score and De Niro’s performance have not dated.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The making bears weight throughout: De Niro’s Travis, from the shy smile at the concession stand to the mirror, a man assembling himself in front of the camera; Michael Chapman’s wet night streets in saturated colour, the cab as a cell; Herrmann’s last score, setting the two halves of Travis against each other; the jump cuts of the gun sale, the training in fragments, slow motion used as perception; the corridor at the telephone and the overhead shot, each a camera movement with a moral. The costs are weighed: Shepherd’s Betsy is played as an idea more than a person, and the scene in which she quotes a song to Travis is stiff; the Palantine scenes are flat; the desaturated climax is a compromise made before release, though it serves the scene.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comic talk between Tom and Betsy in the campaign office, and the massacre on the stairs. One law governs them: the world is a place Travis cannot read. The office comedy is a social code he cannot enter; the massacre is the one code he can. The diary’s pieties and the porno theatre obey the same law, the gap between what he says he is and where he goes, and the epilogue, read as real, keeps it: the society misreads him as he misreads it. The strain is in the scenes outside his presence and in the epilogue’s change of tone. The range is narrower than it looks, one man in one city, mostly at night, and narrowness earns nothing.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Several orders are held: consciousness, at the centre and held completely; the city as a social order, its trade in sex and its classes in the back seat; labour, in the long shifts, the drivers’ talk and the job as identity; the state, in a presidential campaign, the Secret Service and an assassination planned; the press, in the clippings that make a hero. They are integrated through one man, and that is what holds the axis lowest: every order is seen as Travis sees it, and so held in part. War is implied only, in the Marine discharge and the jacket. The family is an absence, a lying letter home. Women are two ideas of a woman, and the sacred only a longing for purity.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.0 and The Living Form at 8.8, then The Archetypal Deep, Pressure on Tradition, The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 8.7. A making that bears weight from the cab coming out of the steam to the overhead shot, a form that is one man’s perception and falls silent when he acts, a captivity myth built into the third act, and a line of solitary men that runs through fifty years of American film.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: the city, labour, the state and the press are held, but each only as Travis sees it, and the family and the sacred are present as absences. Above it, The Inevitable and The Swerve at 8.4: an office comedy that runs past its use, café scenes that repeat and a diary that says what is shown; and a turn on the vigilante film that Mean Streets, the New Hollywood antihero, Powell and Polanski had prepared. The three share a cause, a film built wholly from one man’s perception, which gives it its form and narrows what it can hold.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7, The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The summit is closed twice: by The Swerve, and by the aggregate, 8.6 against 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Taxi Driver as released by Columbia Pictures in the United States on 8 February 1976, from the cab coming out of the steam to the jolt of the rear-view mirror: directed by Martin Scorsese from a screenplay by Paul Schrader, produced by Michael Phillips and Julia Phillips, photographed by Michael Chapman, with music by Bernard Herrmann. No print, script or recording was consulted. There is one release version, with the colour of the final shootout desaturated before release, and it is the object. Schrader’s screenplay as written and as published, and the makers’ later accounts of what the ending means, are not part of the work; the film is read as it stands. Dialogue is quoted only in four short lines whose words are certain, and everything else is described; the songs heard and quoted in the film are not named. Figures that could not be verified, among them the running time, on which sources differ by a minute, the budget, the box-office returns, the number of scenes, the division of the editing credit and the date of any restoration, are not given.