Taxi Driver: Into the Spiral of Loneliness

Danny Debito, December 5, 2025

Taxi Driver is a film about the spiral of loneliness. Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, is a Vietnam-veteran, insomniac, loner who takes up driving a cab because he seemingly has nothing better to do. He drives around New York City at night, witnessing the ugly underbelly of NYC nightlife. Sex workers, pimps, general freaks roam the street. It's like he can’t look away and his newly chosen profession only enables his obsessive watching.

When we see Bickle try to connect with someone–the beautiful, successful, blonde Betsey, played by Cybill Shepherd–he fails utterly. While Betsey at first is intrigued by his “strange” manners, his removal from society and inability to grasp social norms becomes apparent when he takes her to a porno movie for their first date. Of course Betsey doesn’t want to see a porno movie, but Bickle faults her for not telling him she wasn’t into those kinds of movies. It’s incomprehensible to him that attending such an establishment isn’t “normal.”

What becomes apparent from this failed interaction is that Bickle isn’t lonely by choice, but his own behavior is reinforcing his loneliness. He’s stuck in a cycle of rejection; and the loneliness he feels from this latest rejection grows. He begins to be influenced by the strange people he picks up in his taxi; he purchases guns; he starts training every day; he attempts and fails a political assisination of the candidate who Betsey works for.

The only other character we see him attempt to have an interest in is Iris, a twelve-year-old sex worker played by Jodie Foster. He tries to convince Iris to leave her pimp, and when his assassination attempt is thwarted he pivots and kills her pimp, and two other men, in front of her. Scorsese orchestrates a brutally slow gunfight that ends with Bickle attempting to kill himself in front of Iris, but his gun is out of ammo. In a voice over, we learn that Bickle was in a coma for some time, Iris was reunited with her family, and that Bickle has become a sort of hero for “cleaning up the city.” He returns to his taxi driving, and has a positive run-in with Betsey.

Are we supposed to think of this as a happy ending? Almost certainly not. Although it seems like Scorsese is neatly tying the story up with a “satisfying” ending, nothing in the story points towards Bickle having a meaningful capacity to change. He’s still driving around at night, presumably his inner monologue about filth continues.

Bickle is an interesting reflection of American exceptionalism. He embodies the male loneliness epidemic that we’re all talking about nowadays. Scorsese doesn’t want you to empathize with Bickle, just think about why people do crazy things. How people get to the point of thinking violence is the answer. I think that’s a really timely thing for us all to be thinking about.

Because the film is mainly about Bickle’s character, it suffers a little from the sort of aimlessness that Bickle himself is suffering from. Bickle has nothing to say, he has no one to meaningfully confide in, he is alone and doesn’t know what to do. The plot isn’t as important as the character, and because the character isn’t all that compelling (to me) the plot gets a little stale.

TL;DR: The cinematography is great, the score is jazzy, it’s wonderfully acted, the themes are timely, but the plot is just a little too meandering and the film lags a bit in the middle. I would recommend to fans of late night driving, lonely souls, and fans of checking classics off of their watch lists.