Being a millennial, my view of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver has always been colored by historical context. Recognizing the film’s mid-1970s release date and the combination of Travis Bickle’s insomnia, disillusionment, military jacket and service record, I’ve long associated the protagonist’s story with the experience of soldiers coming back from the war in Vietnam. Only bolstering this impression is everything I’ve ever read about the film, as dozens of writers have echoed that read of the classic thriller… but I recently discovered one critic who has challenged that interpretation: writer/director Quentin Tarantino.
In 2022, the filmmaker published the book Cinema Speculation, which is a space for him analyze a number of beloved and underappreciated films from the 1970s – from the action of Peter Yates’ Bullitt and Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, to the thrills of Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway and John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder, to the horror of John Boorman’s Deliverance and Brian De Palma’s Sisters. The tome is an exploration of a vital era in Hollywood history, and some of Tarantino’s most fascinating take is about Scorsese’s 1976 classic – the standout being his theory that Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle did not see action during the Second Indochina War.
Quentin Tarantino Posits That Travis Bickle Is Not A Vietnam Veteran
Bookended with stories about the author’s personal history with film (wonderful insight for anyone who is a fan of his spectacular filmmography), Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation is comprised of a series of essays that each analyze a specific feature, but Taxi Driver gets significant focus in the book. He not only writes about the history of the movie and provides analysis into its storytelling, but also dedicates a special chapter to ponder what would have happened had Brian De Palma directed the movie instead of Martin Scorsese (per Tarantino, the Carrie filmmaker turned it down because it wasn’t “commercial enough.”)
The work touches on many aspects of Taxi Driver, but a significant focus is put on the expressed racism of Travis Bickle, and it’s this analysis of the character’s prejudices that leads to conclusions about his service record being pure fiction. Discussing “societal compromises or audience pandering” in violent films of the 1970s, Tarantino writes,
Even Paul Schrader – in regard to Travis Bickle – slightly invests in this type of character Tom Foolery by suggesting Travis is a Vietnam veteran, and that he did a tour during the war. Horseshit. No fucking way was Travis in Vietnam. The extent of Travis’ paranoia of black males is only credible if they are an other that he has only had superficial contact with. How do you do a tour of duty in Vietnam and only have superficial contact with black dudes? The answer is you can’t.
According to the Library of Congress research guides, 300,000 African Americans served during the Vietnam War, with the demographic making up 31 percent of ground forces in 1965 when they only made up 12 percent of the United States’ population. Quentin Tarantino says that Travis Bickle could still hold racist views after serving alongside Black soldiers, but he doesn’t buy how alienation holds such an important place in his hate.
As for how this impacts Quentin Tarantino’s overall view of the film, he views it as a wholly natural part of Taxi Driver as a character piece: the perspective of Travis Bickle is not to be taken at face value, and that extends to his claims about his military service. The author continues,
I don't have a problem with Travis' fraudulent claim in the movie. The only proof the movie offers up of Travis military service (no Vietnam flashbacks) is his account to Joe Spinell and his jacket. Fine, Travis spends the entire movie demonstrating to the audience that he's an unreliable narrator, completely delusional, and he constantly presents himself to characters in a fraudulent manner (usually to get something he wants at the moment). He bought the jacket in an Army Navy Store.
There is exactly zero wiggle room in Quentin Tarantino’s thoughts on this matter – and his sureness piqued my interest in a rewatch.
How Quentin Tarantino’s Theory Influenced By Own Recent Rewatch Of Taxi Driver
Because this take upended what I had always viewed as a vital aspect of the movie’s social commentary, I immediately became curious about how Quentin Tarantino’s interpretation would stand up in a revisiting of the film. It turns out that I’ll never be able to watch Taxi Driver the same way again.
As Tarantino notes, the evidence of Travis Bickle’s service in Vietnam is minimal; in fact, it’s never outright declared by the protagonist. In an early scene with Joe Spinell’s character (credited as “Personnel Officer”) as he is trying to get a job at the taxi dispatch, Travis says that he served in the Marines and got an honorable discharge in May 1973, but he never explicitly says anything about going overseas.
He wears a military jacket that features some military patches and his name stenciled on it, but it’s never a point of any discussion. A newspaper clipping states that “he fought in a special forces unit in Viet Nam,” but the information is simply sourced to “the president of the taxi garage where Bickle worked out of,” which implies it was secondhand from Travis himself.
The film also never directly correlates the character’s behavior to extensions of post-traumatic stress disorder. He doesn’t sleep at night, but there is nothing in Taxi Driver that suggests it’s because he is haunted by memories of horrors he witnessed in the jungle. He is drawn to violence not out of instinct or training, but because he fetishizes it and sees it as a means toward satisfying his dangerous hero complex. He exhibits issues with authority – evidenced in his aborted assassination attempt of presidential hopeful Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris) – but it’s less reflective of revenge against command structure in the Marines and more impotent response to his rejection by Betsy (Cybill Shepherd).
The idea that Travis Bickle is a Vietnam War veteran is attractive to audiences because it offers easy-to-understand cause and effect: the lead character of Taxi Driver would be a totally normal, well-adjusted human being if it weren’t for the terrifying experiences he had when he was fighting in what history has shown us was a boondoggle of the most extreme order. But believing that also means accepting Travis as the man he presents himself to be, and the film repeatedly shows him as a man who purposefully misrepresents himself.
The Vietnam vet “excuse” is too simple, and putting it aside makes Martin Scorsese’s film that much more bold and shocking: this maladjusted individual is a plain product of modern society.
Curious to do a deep dive into this on your own? Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino is available for purchase in hardcover and paperback and on Kindle and audiobook. After you give it a read, you can check out Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver on streaming with a Max subscription, via digital rental/purchase, or on 4K UHD.
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