“Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”
The most haunting imagery in Taxi Driver — Martin Scorsese’s classic psychological drama — tends to involve firearms, whether real or imagined. In intimate moments and public confrontations, former U.S. Marine Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), now an insomniac cabbie, points real guns and L-shaped fingers at himself and others, perhaps most memorably, in a mirror. “You talkin’ to me?” De Niro improvises, aiming straight down the lens, as the audience becomes both Bickle’s victim and his violent reflection. Watching the movie today, it’s hard not to wonder if Scorsese knew he’d still be talkin’ to us with such clarity 50 years later.
