Awake again I can't pretend
And I know I'm alone
And close to the end
Of the feeling we've known
How long I've been sleeping
How long have I been drifting alone through the night
How long have I been running for that morning flight
Through the whispered promises and the changing light
In the bed where we both lie
Late for the sky
-From the Jackson Browne song "Late for the Sky"
Like the shower slaughter in Hitchcock’s Psycho, Taxi Driver’s most talked-about moment is Travis Bickle’s off-the-cuff "You talkin’ to me?" monologue. There is a reasonable explanation for the popularity of both: we all take showers, and we all talk to ourselves. These scenes tap into a national fear of invasion of privacy by madman and madness, respectively.
Yet there are better scenes in Psycho and Taxi Driver. In the case of the latter, I find the sequence in which a vacant Travis watches—with gun in hand—happy couples on TV’s "American Bandstand" dance to the tune quoted above a much more haunting marriage of the aural and the visual. Taxi-driving insomniac Travis is quietly resentful throughout the picture, but his listening to "Late for the Sky" marks the defining point at which he loses his sanity.
After seeing the movie ten times, I’ve concluded that some elements of Taxi Driver’s narrative do not make perfect sense. When Travis 'naively' takes the innocent object of his desire, his "angel", to a porno theatre, it feels more like an all-too-convenient way to weave her out of the fold than further demonstration of Travis’ self-destructive behaviour. When Travis begs for a chance to lecture twelve-year-old, street-smart prostitute Iris (Foster), it’s difficult to believe her positive reaction. Then there’s that denouement, debated about by critics for years—it’s an epilogue that wants to say too much in a short space.
Then again, a movie without flaws is also one without a soul.
Scorsese’s 1976 masterpiece eased the selfish pain of my youth. I first saw the film (on a miniscule TV, in the basement bedroom of a movie-loving friend, during one drizzly afternoon) when I was fifteen years old, and it spoke to two distinct halves of my being: the cinematic and the emotional. I often point to Taxi Driver as one of the three reasons I wound up attending film school; perhaps more importantly, at a time when loneliness* and hormonally-charged anger threatened to eat me alive, Taxi Driver did the exploding for me.
(*One of Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman’s most brilliant conceits is to avoid letting Travis share the frame with other characters as much as logic will allow.)
Bickle (DeNiro), Taxi Driver’s besieged antihero, is probably twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, but he behaves like an adolescent towards the women he admires. (When his true love, Betsy (Shepherd), casually mentions a Kris Kristofferson song she likes, Travis goes out and buys the whole album the next day. Even though he doesn’t have a record player.) Travis also develops an anarchic fashion sense as the story progresses: his second-to-last act of societal rebellion is shaving his hair into a mohawk, which became a punk symbol of aggression (and a profoundly immature one at that) thereafter.
Thus, in some ways, the dynamic trio of Scorsese, Schrader, and DeNiro crafted the ultimate teen angst drama. The trouble with this assessment is that it argues against Taxi Driver’s home video renaissance. I believe in the Greek theory of catharsis, and that’s why I consider Taxi Driver a therapeutic viewing experience. Select angst-ridden teenagers may see Travis’s violent path instead as one to emulate. Let’s face it, the Littleton tragedy is not an isolated incident, and Taxi Driver is still a film of raw power and savage beauty, dated only by its costume design and the presence of checkered cabs, ripe for discovery by the wrong element. I’m not advocating its censorship—it just might be my favourite motion picture—but we’re living in topsy-turvy times, in a world of unwise parents and gun-obsessed children to whom the word "subtext" ironically has no meaning. I’d hate to see Taxi Driver, which was already blamed for the attempt on President Reagan’s life, excerpted for the six o’clock news again because a copycat delinquint couldn’t get a grip on reality.
All that aside, Columbia Tri-Star’s new Taxi Driver: Collector’s Edition is the best supplement-laden DVD to come down the pike since last year’s smashing (and oft-delayed) The Exorcist: 25th Anniversary Special Edition. Only two aspects of it disappoint: a lack of commentary (the Criterion Collection Laserdisc had one) and a somewhat unimpressive video transfer (I have the Criterion CLV disc and I actually prefer it, in terms of picture quality, to this RSDL DVD). The image is too mucky and indistinct at times, and colours tend towards the brown end of the spectrum. The transfer is anamorphic, at least; it is letterboxed at approximately 1.77:1. I don’t mean to characterize this Taxi Driver as an NTSC disgrace—being a Columbia release, it still frequently impresses. (For what it’s worth, the layer switch, which occurs at 89:36, is highly disruptive.)
What really surprised me was how good the Dolby Surround track is. The 2.0 English track offers a rear channel, so you won’t have to play the audio in analog ProLogic to get the full effect. Bernard Herrmann’s memorable jazz score, for which he was robbed of a posthumous Oscar, resonates; the 1990 Criterion LD has an isolated music track, but Herrmann’s compositions just don’t sound as lush in mono. (The film wasn’t remastered in Dolby ntil its twentieth anniversary theatrical rerelease in 1996.) Here it is finally presented in its stereophonic glory, with precise basslines and accurate separation. The surrounds are also put to surprisingly good use for ambience—I hate to keep making comparisons, but the background noise, the detail of it, is barely audible on the Criterion LD. Voices sound a bit squelched at times on the new version; such is the nature of a 1976 dialogue recording.
The disc’s eerie (yet somehow poorly conceived) black and white menus offer up:
-An insightful 70-minute making-of documentary. Talking heads Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro, Paul Schrader, Albert Brooks, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Peter Boyle, Harvey Keitel, cinematographer Michael Chapman, co-editor Tom Rolfe, and make-up effects designer Dick Smith reflect on the experience of forging Taxi Driver. The doc serves as both a film theory course and a filmmaking course: Schrader is very willing and able to dissect the finished product intellectually, while Chapman and Dick Smith provide fascinating How They Did It-style explanations of the climactic brothel shootout. All offer at least one behind-the-scenes tidbit that I, a person who has read virtually everything ever written about Taxi Driver, did not know.
-A five minute montage of production stills, with commentary by the documentary’s producer, Laurent Bouzereau, who is kind enough to provide even more anecdotes from the cast and crew that he couldn’t squeeze into the other supplements.
-Paul Schrader’s full screenplay, readable on a plain old DVD player (death to DVD-ROM exclusive content!). The script’s novelistic bent might make it an enjoyable read for the uninitiated. One can also navigate between text and the filmed counterpart; this was difficult at first, but I got used to it.
-Full storyboards (doodled by Scorsese) for the bloody battle.
-The original trailer, still harrowing. (Plus trailers for Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and two DeNiro vehicles: The Fan and Awakenings.)
-Advertising materials—unfortunately, without explanation.
-Extensive filmographies.
I truly believe that DVD will become the New Film School. Laserdisc wanted to educate the masses, but it was never affordable enough. At under $30, Taxi Driver is a quarter of the cost of the Criterion CAV release and as wonderful in many ways.
4 Academy Award nominations including Best Picture (1976)! This special Collector s Edition is digitally remastered and includes a never-before-seen m...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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