Cinema Seminar:
Taxi Driver

Taught by Paul Wright, Ph.D.
Instructor of English and History, Main Line Classical Academy

A quintessential work of New Hollywood, Taxi Driver (1976) is imbued with all the cinematic and cultural influences that shaped its screenwriter, Paul Schrader, and director, Martin Scorsese. It is no wonder, then, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, that the Academy rejected it (not to mention All the President’s Men and Network) in favor of the uplifting Rocky, which it declared the year’s Best Picture. Of course, with 50 years of hindsight, from the perspective of cinematic achievement, and at the risk of upsetting much of Greater Philadelphia, this decision is baffling.

Featuring the broken, disengaged loner Travis Bickle in a legendary performance by Robert De Niro, the film was written in roughly two weeks by Schrader (Raging Bull, First Reformed), who has shared that he wrote it in part to confront and perhaps exorcise the Travis within himself. Both Schrader and Scorsese also found inspiration in Dostoevsky’s Russian classic Notes from Underground (1864), arguably the first existentialist novel. As a modern study in primal loneliness, longing, and the fixations they can breed, Taxi Driver kinetically brought to the screen what Dostoevsky had confined to the page.

Featuring an Oscar-nominated turn by a young Jodie Foster (The Accused, The Silence of the Lambs) and spot-on supporting performances by Cybill Shepherd, Albert Brooks, Peter Boyle, and Harvey Keitel, Taxi Driver would go on to become an American classic made with visual mastery informed by a commitment to depicting spiritual darkness—both that of 1970s New York City and of the human condition at large.