I remember, as a teenager, seeing Taxi Driver for the first time in a double bill with Mean Streets at an arthouse movie theatre in London. I came out of Martin Scorsese’s muscular 1976 noir, a searing indictment of American excess after the Vietnam war, and thought to myself: “Boy, I hope they pick up this story again, many years later, preferably in order to sell access to an exploitative ride-sharing app!”
Lo and behold the news this week that Robert De Niro – the actor who turned Travis Bickle’s “you talkin’ to me?” into one of cinema’s most famous lines – would be lending his dramatic chops to an advert for Uber. “Why Bob would do this is beyond my reckoning,” wrote Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver’s screenwriter, on Facebook, prompting a hasty denial from Uber’s publicists. The advert, they said, would not see De Niro reprise his iconic role, nor its iconic dialogue. But this is really just an elaborate contortion. If you put Robert De Niro in a taxi – any taxi – the reference is clear. Much as if you put a martini in Daniel Craig’s hand, a fedora on Harrison Ford’s head, or a kilt around Mel Gibson’s nether regions. The implication? Bickle rides again.
