Taxi Driver

Martin Scorsese's 1976 classic, Taxi Driver explores the depths of delusion and degradation to which a man will descend before committing himself to the abyss. The script spreads thick a sub-story of political nuance, juxtaposed against the workingman's realities of sorrow and forgotten ambition.

During a catalytic scene, friend and fellow cabbie, Wizard, played by Peter Boyle, describes for Robert DeNiro's character how "a man takes a job, you know, and that job [...] becomes what he is".

The closing scenes, as they draw towards the movie's bloody conclusion, slice through Wizard's straightforward notion of identity. In the same way a politician goes home to a wife and family, a young girl pimped for sex isn't altogether a prostitute, and a taxi driver doesn't sit all day in a yellow box on wheels. Yet somehow we're left with this image. A man becomes his job.

I've struggled with this scene for a long time. How does it drive Travis under, into the void, into violence and psychological furor? Do we watch as he shoots his way through the walls of Wizard's theory? I can't help but feel that, for all his intent, Travis fires into the air. Maybe literature has the answer; a writer, after all, is a writer.