The Jean-Paul Sartre novel that inspired ‘Taxi Driver’: “In an American context”
The 1970s continued in the vein of the 1960s when it came to cinematic innovation, with many genres and filmmakers emerging and transforming the art form forever. There were significant developments in everything from romantic comedy to sci-fi and horror. In mainstream American cinema, the New Hollywood era was paving the way for great change, which began in the late 1960s with movies like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider. These films signalled a move towards more experimental and boundary-pushing works that didn’t shy away from taboo topics and nihilism.
Taxi Driver, released in 1976, came nearer the end of the New Hollywood era, but it still remains one of the greatest films from this period. It was Martin Scorsese’s fifth feature-length movie, coming after Mean Streets and the Oscar-winning Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. It is one of his most popular and highly acclaimed works, helping to further put his name on the map as one of Hollywood’s most impressive filmmakers.
Taxi Driver starred Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, an antihero type who spends his nights driving through the rundown streets of New York. He witnesses the crime and corruption that defines the city, something that makes him increasingly disgusted and dejected. As a war veteran, he uses his taxi driving as a way to occupy his time due to his PTSD-induced insomnia, but his poor mental state only worsens because of the depressing and monotonous job.
After Betsy, a woman who he initially finds a connection with, rejects him, Travis spirals deeper into insanity and begins training himself to be physically strong. He buys several guns and sets out to kill various people, including a presidential candidate.
When he fails, he shoots several men involved in pimping out the 12-year-old prostitute Iris, played by Jodie Foster, whom he regularly spots lingering on street corners in the city. He won’t stop until he satisfies his urges to oppose those he believes to be corrupted individuals.
While Scorsese took care of the direction, Paul Schrader wrote the script, and it remains one of his finest screenplays, taking significant influence from European existentialist writers and filmmakers. Talking to Film Comment, he explained, “Before I sat down to write Taxi Driver, I reread [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s Nausea because I saw the script as an attempt to take the European existential hero, that is, the man from The Stranger, Notes from the Underground, Nausea, Pickpocket, Le Feu Follet, and A Man Escaped and put him in an American context.”
In Nausea, one of Sartre’s most accomplished works, we follow protagonist Antoine Roquentin, a man who finds himself increasingly disconnected from everyone around him, causing him to question the meaning of his life. He experiences a strange phenomenon that makes him feel a wave of sickness in relation to the separation he feels from others and normal, everyday things. The novel is a key work of existentialism, and you can definitely draw parallels between Antoine and Travis.
However, Schrader was more interested in putting these ideas into an American setting. “In doing so, you find that he becomes more ignorant, ignorant of the nature of his problem. Travis’ problem is the same as the existential heroes, that is, should I exist? But Travis doesn’t understand that this is his problem, so he focuses it elsewhere: and I think that is a mark of the immaturity and the youngness of our country.”
Schrader added, “The man who feels the time has come to die will go out and kill other people rather than kill himself.” Taxi Driver subsequently plays with the different cultural interpretations of nihilism and existentialism that Schrader observed.
Concluding, “There is not enough intellectual tradition in this country, and not enough history, and Travis is just not smart enough to understand his problem. He should be killing himself instead of these other people. In the end, when he shoots himself in a playful way, that’s what he’s been trying to do all along.”
