While watching Taxi Driver I was extremely uneasy almost all the time. Even from the get-go Travis' statement of "One day a real rain is gonna come and wash all the filth from the streets" was extremely unsettling. The film beautifully builds on that unsettling feeling as the film progresses. Travis' unstable and strange nature is first shown from his brief relationship with Betsy. Through his general lack of social graces and his poor choices in venues for their dates, the audience is shown that Travis is strange, but relatively harmless. Still though, that uneasiness remained.
Later, Travis escalates, quite suddenly with the purchase of multiple firearms, and the construction of a sleeve-gun to holster his pistol in. His behavior with all of these, most notably the "You Talkin' To Me?" scene is clearly offensive, and violent. Still though, the audience is not shown the whole picture, so we are still simply uneasy.
Travis' final turn and where the audience is no longer uneasy, but more horrified, is Travis' attempt to kill Palantine, and his killing of Matthew and the other men involved with Iris' prostitution. The overtly violent nature of this scene boiled over all that previous uneasiness dramatically, and quite well frankly.
I agree with you. I'm not very easily unnerved, so the beginning parts did not have much of an effect. However, the scene where he killed a few men for Iris is quite horrifying because of his sheer determination to get the job done. Getting shot in the neck hardly fazes him nor does anything else.
ReplyDelete