TAXI DRIVER, ANOMIE-INDUCED INSANITY, AND THE WELLBEING OF NYC'S CABBIES

Scorsese’s 1976 film thoughtfully explores the heavy effects now being felt by many gig drivers, a timeless fifty years later.

by Camille Renata

Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver stands at an interesting intersection when it comes to film, pop culture and our mental relationships to time and space. Garnering praise from critics for its immersive depiction of disillusionment and attracting criticism for its revolutionary capturing of gore and violence, the film’s reception is just one of the many contested aspects of its legacy.

A pensive piece on the effects of urban isolation, Taxi Driver has also fallen prey to the meme-ification of classic pictures by simplifying internet subcultures. In this case, the side of “him” culture that iconizes vigilante white male protagonists (see: the Joker, Nightcrawler’s Lou Bloom and the most ubiquitous, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman).

But with the message of Taxi Driver being reduced to a senseless display of violence by some and an adoration of white vigilantism by others, I want to view the film from a new lens: As a classic that explores many of the contemporary problems being faced by working class people trapped in a modern and increasingly un-accessible New York.

The story of Travis Bickle might be fictitious and dated nearly 50 years, but it also might serve as an ominous prediction of the changes to come in one of many of NYC’s quietly dying industries: the taxi service.

Starring a haggard, five-o-clock shadow eclipsed Robert De Niro, Taxi Driver follows a few spiraling weeks in the life of Travis. Fighting an aggressive bout of insomnia, Travis decides to occupy his sleepless nights by using his time instead to drive as a cabby around the city.

From the start, Bickle’s character is shrouded in an alienating gauze of voyeurism. He observes the patrons of his cab from the rearview mirror. He creeps on a pretty young lady working at a political campaign office. And he observes it all with an intense disgust. At the core of his internal battle is his implication in the society he witnesses. He is alive, irreversibly in this world and yet, he detests it.

Taxi Driver undoubtedly serves as a time capsule for the NYC of the 70s that New Yorkers have come to both infamize and romanticize. Referred to by culture writer Edmund White as “a craving for the city that, while at its worst, was also more democratic,” the nostalgia that Taxi Driver evokes with its red-light district Times Square and boxy checker cabs, captures a city distinctly different from the one New Yorkers know today. But is it really all that different?

---

A closer look at the film and the parallels it strikes with the plight of taxi drivers working today reveals that some things are just as bad, if not worse. The world of Taxi Driver may be dramatized, but the problems faced by its protagonist exist in a worsening reality for those drivers adjusting to an increasingly saturated gig economy.

In 2018, livery cab driver Douglas Schifter committed suicide on the steps of City Hall. In a Facebook post he wrote hours prior to his death, he outlined his financial struggles as the main reason for taking his life. Starting as a cab driver in the 1980s, he was able to manage 40-50 hour work weeks.

But as the city’s landscape transformed into a gritty-cosplay land for the rich and companies like Uber and Lyft affected market supply, Schifter was forced to work an average of 100 to 120 hours a week for the last decade.

Schifter’s story and the problems that pushed him to his decision to end his life are ones that other taxi drivers are still dealing with. The signs of despair in the industry are everywhere. From retirement-aged drivers managing 12 hour shifts to the kidney problems plaguing workers who must hold in their urine due to denial of access to public bathrooms, the profession of driving is severely underestimated.

It shouldn’t be lost in this crisis that the majority of those dying and surviving in the system are part of “a vulnerable, largely immigrant population.” Their situation is aggravated by a culture of male emotional dissonance that isolates men not only from other people but from themselves and their feelings.

Scorsese’s 1976 film thoughtfully explores the heavy effects now being felt by many gig drivers, a timeless fifty years later. One of the values I find in Taxi Driver is its portrayal of the effects of labor in liminal spaces on mental deterioration. Taxi Driver may be a narrative piece, but it is based in a degree of ethnography that with climbing age, reaffirms an increasingly real reality.

---