Date Night with a Taxi Driver

Travis Bickle is working hard.

Pulling down three fifty a week.

Especially when he works OFF the meter.

Betsy (played by the drop dead gorgeous Cybill Shepherd) works at Senator Palantine’s presidential campaign HQ.

A masterfully nerdy and awkward Albert Brooks is her besotted colleague. Trying and failing miserably to charm and win her affections with his silly stories and clumsy distractions.

Into this scenario marches a prime Bobby De Niro, young, handsome and more or less presentable in his cheap ass, but clean and well pressed red suit.

He hits Betsy with one of the greatest shots in cinematic history. Quickly abandoning the pretence of wanting to volunteer for the Senator’s campaign, Travis asks her out on a date. Betsy demurs and noncommittally teases him along.

Undeterred, Travis cuts through all her bullshit and lays her wide open with his heartfelt and most passionate of pitches. He identifies Betsy as a lonely person – as per his observations while driving past the building – and draws himself as a kindred spirit. He wants to take her out for coffee and pie. And he won’t (in an attractive and alluring manner) be taking no for an answer.

Betsy surrenders, abandoning her strategy of minxy mind games and the date is set.

Coffee and pie happens. And goes very well.

A second date is arranged and agreed upon.

A movie on this occasion.

Travis appears to be levelling up in the most promising of ways possible.

The night arrives, and a neat and presentable Travis makes further inroads with Betsy when he presents her with a thoughtful gift.

A vinyl copy of a Kris Kristofferson album – reference to the telling observation Betsy made towards Travis over coffee and pie. That he is a contradiction.

The deal sealed – for all intents and purposes – Travis proceeds to squire Betsy towards the movie theatre. To take in a flick (we must assume) he has been scheming and planning out since their recent, and most successful coffee and pie meet-up.

And then…

Dear Jesus!

Even writing out this next part is PAINFUL.

Travis takes Betsy to what appears to be the dirtiest and seediest porno theatre ever featured in cinematic history.

For context, Scorsese shot Taxi Driver in New York in the summer of 1976. It wasn’t hard, back then, to illustrate the fact that the Big Apple was an open sewer of a city.

Outside the theatre, Betsy pulls up short and gives Travis an obvious out.

You’re kidding me, right?

As an audience member, you are screaming at the screen for Travis to recognise the opportunity and reverse course.

But he doesn’t.

Instead, he innocently reassures her that this is a perfectly acceptable place for young couples to go when courting.

Betsy, reluctantly, gives him the benefit of the doubt.

In all fairness to him though, Travis does at least pay for the tickets and popcorn.

But less than one scene into the gaudy porno, Betsy rears up out of her seat and walks out on him.

Travis pursues and inexplicably questions her adverse reaction.

A sincerely befuddled Betsy questions what is wrong with him. Bringing her to this seedy cesspool, thinking that such a thing was appropriate.

Travis, god love him, stares back at her blankly, still not getting it.

Betsy hails a cab.

Travis implores her to take the album.

Betsy, with no sense of malice or hostility in her heart, delivers the finishing blow.

Keep it. I already have it.

Okay.

Let’s all just take a breath.

What I have just laid out before you, is one of the most intriguing and hotly debated subjects, that has been discussed and disseminated by me and my writing buddies – ad nauseam – for years on end.

Taxi Driver is a masterpiece.

Scorsese, Bobby D, Harvey, Albert Brooks, Jodie Foster and Peter Boyle at their very best.

I’ve often heard the tale (apocryphal or not) that screenwriter Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay with a loaded .44 on one side of his desk and a bottle of tequila on the other.

Personally, and seeing as he is still alive and seemingly well, I hope that’s true.

The burning issue, still unresolved, in spite of the countless hours me and my chums, Ken Harmon being chief among them, have spent debating it, is why Travis would sabotage his own positive progress with Betsy with such an obvious and dumbass move.

The most reliable explanation we have fallen upon goes as follows…

Travis is losing his mind from the get go.

Insomnia.

Indigestion.

Chronic Isolation.

Working nights in that absolute grind of a job, ferrying the worst kinds of people around the city to execute their seedy and immoral pursuits.

He is a sailor lost at sea, drowning and in dire need of a lifebelt.

Betsy is his one last hope of survival.

He latches on to her.

He gains buoyancy, time and the slim prospect of survival.

All the while, the madness and disintegration of his mind carries on regardless.

In such a scenario, a person losing touch with reality could arguably be blind to the social cues and disaster in waiting that comes from their choice of second date setting.

Interestingly enough, the final scene in the movie, has Betsy catching a ride in Travis’s cab after his national exposure as a standalone hero – gravely wounded during his self appointed mission to rescue a twelve year old Jodie Foster from the cadre of pimps and pushers who had taken her hostage and sold her out to make their despicable money.

Betsy leads the conversation. A fully recovered Travis, looking healthy and renewed, barely speaks in response to her promptings. He just drives and discreetly checks her out via his rear view mirror. By the time he drops Betsy off, she has all but made it clear that a long awaited third date is in the offing. If Travis wants that opportunity, all he need do is call. Lines open – 24/7.

Because Marty S is a genius, we as the audience, feel this incredible bounce of euphoria and optimism. After all of the detritus and shite he has been through, Travis is destined and bound towards his romantic happy ending.

And yet again, because Marty is a certified and near peerless genius, he undermines and cuts short that wholesome and uplifting moment with the final frame of the movie. Travis does a double take in the mirror, underscored by the music and FX, leaving us with the distinct impression that – no matter how much we like Travis and empathise with his struggles – he is, fundamentally, a human atom bomb, destined to explode, causing brutal and collateral damage in the process.

The porno theatre, Travis??

WHY ON EARTH DID YOU TAKE HER TO THE PORNO THEATRE????!!!