One afternoon Paul Schrader delivered a lecture to film students and presented his technique for writing screenplays. Schrader opened with describing the connection between the writer's life and work: a screenplay is inherently influenced by the writer's mood and experiences at the time of the writing. Schrader encouraged the students to pick something that they struggled with -- then create a metaphor for it. A tangible metaphor. Similarly, Vsevolod Pudovkin's seminal thirties work, Film Technique, prescribes that the scenarist must write an idea that can become plastic. Conveying the moving visual experience of film is what makes cinema unique from other art forms.
Schrader writes on the theme of loneliness in his screenplay Taxi Driver. His plastic metaphor for loneliness is a taxi cab. Travis Bickle, the mentally unstable 'Nam vet, drives his cab around the dark, sordid streets of New York City at its most godawful hours and fumes over "all the aminals that come out at night -- whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, nenal." Foreshadowing his cleansing of New York's gutters, Travis muses that "someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."
Martin Scorsese faithfully adapts Schrader's script to the screen. Scorsese says that "visually, everything is shown from Travis' point of view." Scorsese not only creates sympathy for the anti-hero but places the audience in his shoes, in his mohawk, in his room pulling every muscle tight. A dense atmosphere of an individual estranged from society is embodied by the camera with tight shots in the cab, close-ups on his eyes, a red filter as the reflection of traffic lights, low key lighting, and whatnot. De Niro buzzes with energy as Travis slowly descends deeper into insanity. Travis' contradictory actions propel him deeper into isolation and ill health, drinking cases of Coke and downing fast food after immense workouts. .
The film solidifies its longevity and resonance with its universal theme. Travis' cabbing embodies loneliness, floating through the Eastern night with an ironic soft jazz soundtrack. What Travis feels is a reflection of one of humanity's oldest and strongest emotion. The queer-Jew Allen Ginsberg optimistically spurts: "Everybody's lonely. That's the beauty of life. The sense of lonely solitariness.... I'm proud to be lonely!" The taxi driver might not agree.
