All the animals come out at night.
The diary starts clean. Neat handwriting. Reasonable observations. “June 8th. My life has taken another turn again. The days go on and on. They don’t end.” He drives. He watches. He describes the city the way a patient describes symptoms — precisely, without affect, as though the decay out there is a medical condition and he is the only one reading the chart.
Then the handwriting gets worse.
That’s the nerve. Not the mohawk. Not the gun. Not the mirror. The nerve is the voice — that calm, insomniac, meticulous narration that sounds like sanity and isn’t. Travis Bickle is not a maniac from the first frame. He is a man who cannot sleep, cannot connect, cannot touch another person without the interaction curdling. He takes Betsy to a porno theatre because he genuinely doesn’t understand what’s wrong with that. He drives through Times Square and sees filth — real filth, the kind 1970s New York produced in abundance — and his disgust is not unreasonable. His conclusions are. Scorsese and Schrader’s genius is giving you a protagonist whose observations are almost right and whose solutions are catastrophically wrong, and filming the distance between the two with a camera that rides in the back seat and doesn’t intervene.
Travis wants to save someone. Betsy, then Iris, then maybe just the city itself. He doesn’t know the difference between rescue and annihilation. The rain, he says, will come and wash all the scum off the streets. He is the rain. He is also the scum. The film knows this. Travis doesn’t. And the ending — the newspapers calling him a hero, the camera pulling up and away from the cab, the rearview mirror catching something in his eyes that might be the whole thing starting again — is Scorsese’s cruelest joke: the city will take a killer and call him a saint, because the city, too, cannot tell the difference.
If that voice is what stayed with you — steady, wrong, aimed at something — then the night shift is yours.
The Windshield — four films connected to Taxi Driver by threads you can name. The lonely man. The city at night. The violence that mistakes itself for virtue.
The Rearview — five films that share nothing with Scorsese’s on the surface but catch the same reflection when you glance up. Different city. Different decade. Same eyes in the mirror.
Nine films. The meter’s running. Get in.
The Windshield
Films connected to Taxi Driver by threads you can name. You’ve driven these streets. The wipers are on. The view is familiar.
The King of Comedy (1982) — Martin Scorsese
The thread: The Scorsese-De Niro film that is actually Taxi Driver’s twin — the loner whose fantasy of connection becomes a siege.
Rupert Pupkin wants to be a talk show host. He rehearses in his basement with cardboard cutouts of celebrities. He kidnaps Jerry Langford — a Johnny Carson figure played by Jerry Lewis with the warmth removed — and holds him hostage in exchange for a spot on the show. He gets the spot. He does the monologue. He goes to prison. He comes out famous.
This is the film people skip in the Scorsese-De Niro canon, and it’s the one that explains Travis Bickle most clearly. Rupert is Travis without the gun — or rather, Travis with a different weapon. Both men are desperately, pathologically lonely. Both construct elaborate fantasies about the connection they deserve. Both mistake the fantasy for a plan. And both act on the plan with a commitment so total, so immune to social cues, that the world — baffled, frightened — gives them what they want. Travis gets the newspaper headline. Rupert gets the talk show. Both are rewarded for behaviour that should have been stopped, and neither understands that the reward is the system’s failure, not their triumph.
Scorsese shot The King of Comedy in a flat, daytime style that is the exact opposite of Taxi Driver‘s nocturnal expressionism. No rain. No neon. No saxophone. Just fluorescent lights and the blank, polite terror of a man who won’t leave the lobby. It’s the scarier film. Travis at least looks dangerous. Rupert looks like your neighbour. The neighbour who keeps inviting you to something you don’t want to attend. The neighbour who will not take no for an answer. The neighbour who is smiling.
Le Samouraï (1967) — Jean-Pierre Melville
The thread: The solitary man, the empty apartment, the city as a surface he moves across without touching.
Jef Costello is a hitman in Paris. His apartment contains a bed, a bird in a cage, and nothing else. He puts on his coat. He adjusts his hat. He goes out. He kills a man. He comes home. The bird is still in the cage. Melville films the entire process — the dressing, the driving, the killing, the return — with the same cold, ritualistic precision, as though murder and grooming are the same category of act: things a man does to maintain his shape in a world that would dissolve him if he stopped.
Costello is Travis Bickle in a Parisian overcoat. Both men live in apartments that are not homes but holding cells — spaces where a man waits between shifts. Both move through their cities as though enclosed in glass, observing everything, participating in nothing. Both have ritualised their isolation to the point where the ritual is the identity: Travis’s push-ups, his diary, his route through the city; Costello’s hat, his Citroën, his method. Remove the ritual and neither man exists. Both films understand that masculine solitude, at a certain depth, becomes its own religion — complete with sacraments, discipline, and a doctrine that no one else is invited to read.
Melville is cooler than Scorsese — his Paris is grey, not neon; his violence is surgical, not explosive. But the temperature of the protagonist is identical: absolute zero. A man who has replaced human connection with procedure and cannot tell the difference between the two. The bird in the cage is the only living thing in Costello’s world. It dies when he does. Neither of them makes a sound.
A Clockwork Orange (1971) — Stanley Kubrick
The thread: The young man, the city, the ultraviolence — and the system that produces him, punishes him, and produces him again.
Alex DeLarge loves Beethoven, milk, and beating people unconscious. He narrates his crimes in a voice — playful, musical, invented — that makes the violence feel like performance, which is exactly Kubrick’s point: Alex is not an aberration. He is a product. The society that condemns him is the same society that made him, and the treatment that “cures” him — the Ludovico technique, which makes him physically ill at the thought of violence — doesn’t cure anything. It just moves the violence from the individual to the state.
Travis and Alex are both young men whose violence is partially a response to a world they experience as fake, degraded, and unworthy of respect. Both narrate their own stories in voices that are unsettlingly articulate — too controlled for madness, too detached for sanity. And both films refuse to give you a comfortable moral position. Scorsese doesn’t let you dismiss Travis as a psychopath because his observations about the city are too accurate. Kubrick doesn’t let you dismiss Alex as a monster because the monsters who treat him are worse.
The difference is satire. Kubrick is clinical, sardonic, operating at the level of systems. Scorsese is intimate, operating at the level of a single man’s nervous system. A Clockwork Orange shows you the machine. Taxi Driver shows you one of its parts. Both films know the machine is running. Neither offers to turn it off.
Nightcrawler (2014) — Dan Gilroy
The thread: The night driver, the predatory gaze, and the city that rewards the man who watches its suffering and sells it back.
Lou Bloom drives through Los Angeles at night with a police scanner and a camera. He films car accidents, house fires, murder scenes — anything that bleeds — and sells the footage to a morning news show whose producer will pay more for victims who are white and affluent because white affluent fear sells advertising. Lou learns. Lou adapts. Lou begins to arrange the scenes he films — moving a body, withholding a tip to the police, engineering a shootout in a restaurant — because the footage is better when the camera arrives first.
Gilroy’s film is Taxi Driver relocated from the driver’s seat to the news van, and the relocation reveals something Scorsese left implicit: Travis’s gaze is not just lonely. It is consumptive. He watches the city. He catalogues its filth. He processes its inhabitants as categories — whores, pimps, junkies, the man who deserves killing. Lou does the same thing with a camera and a business model. Both men drive through a city at night and convert what they see into something useful — Travis into a justification for violence, Lou into a commodity for sale. Both are disgusted by the world and both need the world’s disgust to function.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Lou with the same unblinking focus De Niro brings to Travis — the eyes that don’t look away, the smile that arrives one beat too late, the body that takes up space in a room as though calculating how much space is available. Both performances are portraits of men who have studied human behaviour without understanding it and who replicate its forms the way an insect replicates a leaf: perfectly, and for entirely different reasons.
The Rearview
No shared surface. Different city, decade, language. But glance in the mirror and the eyes are the same — watching you, watching themselves, unable to tell the difference.
Pickpocket (1959) — Robert Bresson
What the mirror shows: The hand that steals — not for money, but because the act of taking is the only substitute for the act of touching.
Michel is a young Parisian. He has no job, no friends, no reason to steal. He steals anyway. He steals wallets on the Métro with a technique so precise it looks like surgery — the fingers sliding into the pocket, the extraction, the pass to a partner, the exit. Bresson films the hands in close-up, and the hands are beautiful, and the act is compulsive, and Michel cannot explain why he does it except that when he does it, he feels something. Not pleasure. Contact. The only contact he can make.
Paul Schrader has said that Pickpocket is the foundation of Taxi Driver — that Travis Bickle is Michel with a gun instead of a hand. Both men keep diaries. Both are isolated in a city of millions. Both perform a compulsive, ritualised, socially destructive act that functions as a substitute for human connection. Michel steals. Travis cleans his gun, does his push-ups, drives his route. Both are reaching toward the world through the only gesture they know, and the gesture is always a violation.
Bresson’s film is fifty-nine minutes long, shot in grey, with no music and actors who have been directed to show no emotion. It is the opposite of Scorsese in every technical respect. But the man inside the film — the one writing in his diary, the one moving through the city with his hands ready, the one who can only connect by taking — is the same man. The cab and the Métro are the same vehicle. The fare and the wallet are the same transaction. Both men are paying for something they don’t know how to ask for.
Chungking Express (1994) — Wong Kar-wai
What the mirror shows: The same nocturnal loneliness — but the city that answers instead of punishes, and the loneliness that becomes tenderness instead of violence.
Two cops in Hong Kong. One has been dumped and buys a can of pineapple every day because the expiration date is his deadline for grief. The other has been dumped and doesn’t notice that the woman who works at the lunch counter has been sneaking into his apartment, cleaning it, replacing his things, rearranging his life. Wong Kar-wai films both stories in the same neon-soaked, rain-slicked, midnight Hong Kong that Scorsese films in Taxi Driver — the same sleepless city, the same close-up faces, the same feeling of being awake when the world is asleep and wondering if anyone else is out there.
The connection is the inversion. Travis Bickle is lonely in New York and the loneliness turns to disgust, then rage, then a gun. Cop 663 is lonely in Hong Kong and the loneliness turns to bewilderment, then pineapple, then “California Dreamin’” on repeat. Both men are adrift. Both men are filling the void with ritual — Travis with his diary, the cop with his expiring cans. But Wong’s city is kinder than Scorsese’s. Or rather: Wong’s camera is kinder. It finds the comedy in the loneliness, the sweetness in the obsession, the possibility that the woman rearranging your apartment might be the answer to a question you forgot you asked.
This film is the antidote to Taxi Driver without being its opposite. The loneliness is real. The city is real. The night is real. But in Wong’s Hong Kong, the rain doesn’t wash the scum off the streets. The rain just makes everything reflect — and in the reflection, sometimes, you catch someone looking back.
Naked (1993) — Mike Leigh
What the mirror shows: Travis Bickle with a vocabulary — the brilliant, predatory loner who walks through a city at night talking at everyone and connecting with no one.
Johnny is homeless, Northern, and the most articulate person in any room he enters. He arrives in London and walks. For the entire film, he walks — through council estates, office buildings, empty streets — and he talks. He talks about the Book of Revelation. He talks about bar codes and the surveillance state. He talks about the heat death of the universe. He talks to a security guard, a waitress, a woman who lets him sleep on her floor, and in every conversation he is dazzling, cruel, and absolutely incapable of the one thing every person he meets is offering: human warmth without a transaction.
David Thewlis’s performance is what De Niro’s would be if Travis had read Dostoyevsky. Johnny is Travis with the interior monologue externalised — the diary spoken aloud, aimed at strangers, weaponised. Both men are disgusted by the world. Both men are disgusted by themselves. Both move through a city at night as though the night is a natural habitat and daylight is the foreign country. But Travis’s violence is physical — the gun, the bloodbath, the rescue that is also a massacre. Johnny’s violence is verbal. He uses intelligence the way Travis uses a .44: to dominate, to control, to keep the other person at a distance so precise that he can study them without being touched.
Leigh’s London is not Scorsese’s New York. It is quieter, greyer, more class-conscious, and the despair is less cinematic — no neon, no saxophone, just the sound of a man’s boots on wet pavement at three in the morning. But Johnny and Travis are brothers. Both are men of genuine perception and zero empathy. Both see the world clearly and respond to the clarity by destroying the nearest available person. Both walk through a city that is falling apart and feel — incorrectly, precisely, compellingly — that they are the only ones who notice.
Vengeance Is Mine (1979) — Shōhei Imamura
What the mirror shows: The killer without a psychology — the portrait that refuses to explain why and trusts you to sit with the refusal.
Iwao Enokizu is a real person. He killed five people in Japan in 1963. Imamura made a film about him that is not a thriller, not a procedural, not a character study, and not a cautionary tale. It is a portrait — cold, comprehensive, almost anthropological — of a man who kills and steals and impersonates and seduces, and who at no point offers a reason that would allow you to file him under a category and move on.
This is the connection to Taxi Driver that operates at the deepest level: both films refuse the psychology. Scorsese and Schrader give you Travis’s diary, his routine, his Vietnam service, his insomnia — and none of it explains him. You cannot assemble a clinical profile from the evidence. Travis is not a diagnosis. He is a man. Imamura takes this refusal further: Vengeance Is Mine gives you Iwao’s childhood, his father, his Catholicism, his lovers, his con artistry — and none of it adds up. The film dares you to find the explanation and then quietly, methodically, removes every explanation you construct.
Both directors understand that the most terrifying thing about violence is not its motivation but its opacity — the fact that a man can kill and the reason can be inadequate, or absent, or so tangled in the ordinary material of a human life that isolating it would require destroying the life itself. Imamura is clinical where Scorsese is visceral. He watches Iwao the way a biologist watches a specimen — without judgment, without empathy, with total attention. The specimen does not benefit from the attention. Neither does the viewer. But the attention is the film. And the film does not look away.
A Short Film About Killing (1988) — Krzysztof Kieślowski
What the mirror shows: Three acts of killing — the murder, the trial, the execution — and the film that refuses to rank them.
A young drifter wanders through Warsaw. He has no plan. He kills a taxi driver. The killing is filmed in real time — long, clumsy, horrible, nothing like the cinema of violence. A lawyer defends him. The lawyer is young, earnest, believes in the law. The state convicts the drifter. The state kills him. The execution is filmed with the same unflinching duration as the murder. The lawyer stands outside the prison afterward and says: “I abhor it.”
Kieślowski’s film is fifty-five minutes long and it contains the most devastating critique of violence in cinema — not because it is graphic, but because it is democratic. The drifter’s killing of the taxi driver is appalling. The state’s killing of the drifter is appalling. Both are filmed with the same cold, greenish light, the same unhurried duration, the same refusal to look away. The film does not argue that the state’s violence is worse than the individual’s. It argues that they are the same act — and that the only honest response to either is the lawyer’s: I abhor it.
Travis Bickle kills three men and the newspapers call him a hero. Scorsese’s ending is a satire of exactly what Kieślowski makes explicit: the system’s relationship with violence is not moral. It is managerial. The same act — killing a man — is a crime when done by a drifter and a service when done by a vigilante or a state. Taxi Driver shows you the vigilante being absorbed into the system. A Short Film About Killing shows you the system doing the absorbing. Both films leave you with the same question: if the city produces the violence and then consumes the violent man, who is driving the cab?
End of Shift
You came here from Taxi Driver. You got in the cab. Here’s where the routes diverge.
If the voice drew you — Travis’s diary, that steady, meticulous, deranged narration — Pickpocket and The King of Comedy are the same voice in different registers. Bresson gives you the diary without the words. Scorsese gives you the diary turned into a talk show pitch. Both men are writing themselves into a story that doesn’t want them.
If the city drew you — the nocturnal streets, the neon, the windshield — Le Samouraï, Nightcrawler, and Chungking Express all drive the same route at different hours. Melville’s Paris is grey. Gilroy’s LA is fluorescent. Wong’s Hong Kong is neon. All three cities are the same city: the one that looks different at 3 AM.
If the violence drew you — not the spectacle but the question of it, why it happens and what the world does with it afterward — A Clockwork Orange and A Short Film About Killing. Kubrick shows you the system that makes the violent man and then punishes him. Kieślowski shows you two acts of killing and dares you to find the moral difference.
If the loneliness drew you — the real nerve, the one underneath the gun — Naked is waiting. Johnny walks through London the way Travis drives through New York: brilliant, predatory, reaching for something and destroying everything he touches. Vengeance Is Mine gives you the loneliness without the reaching — just the man, the acts, and the silence where the explanation should be.
Nine films. The meter’s off. The shift is over.
The diary is still in the glove box. Don’t read it. It won’t help.
Leave a comment