There's a moment at a political rally when Travis, in dark glasses, smiles in a strange way that reminds us of those photos of Bremer just before he shot Wallace. We're not told where Travis comes from, what his specific problems are, whether his ugly scar came from Vietnam - because this isn't a case study, but a portrait of some days in his life. "Taxi Driver" is a brilliant nightmare and like all nightmares it doesn't tell us half of what we want to know. Travis has been shut out so systematically, so often, from a piece of the action that eventually he has to hit back somehow. That Scorsese finds the rejection more painful than the murders is fascinating, because it helps to explain Travis Bickle, and perhaps it goes some way toward explaining one kind of urban violence. This is interesting, because later, when Travis goes on a killing rampage, the camera goes so far as to adopt slow motion so we can see the horror in greater detail. Why? Because, he says, it's as if we can't bear to watch Travis feel the pain of being rejected.
Scorsese calls this shot the most important one in the film. Pauline Kael's review called this shot - which calls attention to itself - a lapse during which Scorsese was maybe borrowing from Antonioni.
The director, Martin Scorsese, gives us a shot of Travis on a pay telephone - and then, as the girl is turning him down, the camera slowly dollies to the right and looks down a long, empty hallway. All the same, he calls her for another date, and it's here that we get close to the heart of the movie. She goes out with him a couple of times, but the second time he takes her to a hard-core film and she walks out in disgust and won't have any more to do with him. He sees a beautiful blonde working in the storefront office of a presidential candidate. He tries to break the cycle - or maybe he just sets himself up to fail again. His sexual frustration is channeled into a hatred for the creeps he obsessively observes. Travis isn't into that, he hates it, but Times Square feeds his anger. It's here that an ugly kind of sex comes closest to the surface - the sex of buying, selling, and using people. Travis could in theory look for fares anywhere in the city, but he's constantly drawn back to 42nd Street, to Times Square and the whores, street freaks, and porno houses. And then, even more cruelly, the city seems filled with men who can have these women - men ranging from cloddish political hacks to street-corner pimps who, nevertheless, have in common the mysterious ability to approach a woman without getting everything wrong.
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