Now I see it clearly, my whole life is pointed in one direction
Taxi Driver is one of Scorsese’s greatest films, if not the greatest. It surveys the darkest, seamiest nightlife of New York City in the prescient story of Travis Bickle, an insomniac Vietnam veteran who is wracked with paranoid delusions and obsessions, and cannot connect with people in any positive fashion, turning instead to violence. These were politically charged times, with sixties idealism ground to dust by the hellish end to the decade, Vietnam, Nixon, and assassinations of radical leaders. Under the pressure of it all, we get the portrait of Bickle as a man who cannot process it. Frustrated sexually and emotionally, his only outlet is violence in misguided search of attention or justice. A man waiting for ’someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.’
The striking visuals of the neon and rain slick streets of New York nights in the mid-seventies as taxis glide through the streets like predators are immeasurably aided by the similarly striking score by Bernard Herrmann. This was Herrmann’s final score (finished the day he died), the end of a long and remarkably distinguished career (particularly in collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles), and it is a fitting closure. As this is a movie that is claustrophobically within a character’s head for its entire length, dominated by his moods and preoccupations, there is a raring intensity to the music.
Bickle’s two sides are portrayed in two distinct themes. His tension and building inner obsessions (despite his claims that he does not ‘believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention… that someone should become a person, like other people.’) and growing disconnect from the world around him into a more black and white world of his own creation are characterized by the film’s main theme (and its variations). This is a heavily gusting brass crescendo, it breathes in, building up force and tension, then lets go and breathes back out, growing more and more tightly wound up. The second is a whimsically romantic jazz theme, calm, circular, idyllic. These two themes wind together and build up nervous energy.
In the film, it is astonishingly effective. So what of listening to it on its own? The epic swoop of the main theme is a tense, disquieting theme that repeats throughout the course of the album, alternated with the romantic theme, and as someone who, like Bickle, is afflicted with insomnia, I often find myself driving around the streets at all hours of the night or simply lying awake staring at the ceiling (particularly in the heat of summertime), and this music is the perfect accompaniment. Indeed, the album is almost entirely composed of the same two or three themes replayed over and over with varying tempo and instrumentation, but these are elemental, evocative themes, and they hold a dark, eerie fascination. When the romantic theme reappears in the “Sport and Iris” section played on cold electric piano in the midst of foreboding, orchestral brass, the progression of mood through the piece is definite. When in the middle of the following track, the same theme restored to its original orchestration is briskly cut off by a furious swell, we enter endgame.
This CD reissue adds seven ‘additional interpretations.’ These generally entail rearrangements of sections of the theme, and some peculiar remixing. The addition of DeNiro’s narration to “Diary of a Taxi Driver” is interesting, but for the most part, these are curiosities more than anything (and the funk versions of the theme are nothing but ill-considered – weird! Eerie!). Still, this is one of the great film scores of the seventies, and one that retains its skin-crawling anxiety even away from that great film.
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