It was in the course of the gritty, neon-lit haze of 1976, when Martin Scorsese dropped a movie that might etch itself into cinematic historical past for many years to come back. His cinematic masterpiece ‘Taxi Driver’ offered a glimpse of a darkish, feverish descent into city alienation, and launched audiences to Travis Bickle, an ex-marine and Vietnam veteran, working as a taxi-driving insomniac whose paranoia and disdain for town’s decay simmered into one thing unforgettable.
And, in fact, no second within the movie resonates fairly like that scene – the mirror, the gun, and the road that might cement itself in popular culture ceaselessly, “Are you talkin’ to me?”
The enduring line wasn’t simply one other scripted monologue. Actually it was pure, unfiltered Robert De Niro and moreover, it was improvised, uncooked, and eerily excellent, that gave Travis a second of self-styled reckoning.
Improvisation or Borrowed Brilliance?
The official story credit De Niro’s improvisational genius as he cooked it up himself. However, like several nice Hollywood thriller, the roots of this legendary line stay tangled in hypothesis. Some hint it again to Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), the place Marlon Brando’s character shares an unsettling dialog together with his personal reflection.
Taxi Driver’s screenwriter, Paul Schrader, as soon as urged the affect of an underground comic, however then, years later, an surprising title entered the combination – Bruce Springsteen.
Did Bruce Springsteen Encourage Travis Bickle?
Clarence Clemons, saxophonist for the E Avenue Band, dropped a captivating nugget in his 2009 memoir the place he disclosed that De Niro as soon as advised him the well-known line got here straight from “The Boss.”
Springsteen supposedly tossed the phrase into his performances, one thing De Niro picked up on and repurposed for Bickle. However right here’s the place it will get murky. Selection suggests Bruce solely began utilizing it throughout his “Quarter to Three” rap after Taxi Driver had wrapped. Except, in fact, he had been saying it earlier, in smaller venues, and De Niro simply occurred to be listening.
Even Springsteen himself isn’t certain. When the subject got here up at a non-public Netflix occasion in 2019, he shrugged it off as an city fable. Scorsese, being Scorsese, mused that it could be true as in spite of everything, nobody actually knew the place the road originated. And De Niro? Nicely, he wasn’t precisely ready by the telephone to set the file straight.
The Final Antihero
No matter the place it got here from, the scene grew to become legendary, securing De Niro an Oscar nomination and ceaselessly shaping the picture of the cinematic antihero.
Travis Bickle wasn’t simply one other brooding protagonist, he was an unsettling enigma, a person teetering between vigilante justice and outright delusion.
His affect bled past the display as John Hinckley Jr.’s obsession with Jodie Foster led to a stunning assassination try on President Reagan in 1981, proving simply how deeply Taxi Driver had embedded itself within the cultural psyche. Many years later, Travis’ spirit would floor once more, his DNA evident in Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck in Joker.
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