Is The Ending Of Taxi Driver Totally Different From What You Thought?

As part of our series on mind-blowing movie fan theories, we’re changing the way you watch some of Hollywood’s most famous films.

Today, ‘Taxi Driver’.

The theory

The upbeat conclusion of Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic is actually Travis Bickle’s delusion as he lies bleeding out on a sofa in Harvey Keitel’s brothel having been shot multiple times in a gun battle with child prostitute Iris’s (Jodie Foster) pimp and his accomplices.

The evidence

It’s all a dream

How likely is it a film as bleak as ‘Taxi Driver’ would have a happy ending? In the finished movie, we see a note from Iris’s father thanking Travis for saving his daughter. Bickle’s hair is back to normal and he seems like he might get together with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd).

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But throughout the movie, writer Paul Schrader isn’t afraid to confront the audience with Bickle’s (Robert De Niro) asocial and psychotic personality. He takes Betsy on a porn movie date and is planning to assassinate a senator.

Is it realistic that a nice girl like Betsy would come back to him as she does in his cab in the penultimate scene when she knows what he’s really like? Yes he saved a young prostitute, but he murdered a whole bunch of people doing it. Is that really the kind of person you want to settle down with? He would be if he was making it all up.

Then think about Travis himself. All of his actions come because he feels marginalised and alone. Killing Senator Palantine was supposed to demonstrate that corrupt people can’t get away with their evil deeds, so if he dies helping Iris escape, his twisted worldview that he’s a secret superman can’t exist. It makes sense that his imagination would generate a scenario where the world realised that he was the one who was right all along.

As for the final shot of him seeing himself in his rearview mirror, it could be interpreted multiple ways. One is that while he’s been momentarily happy with Betsy, he suddenly reconnects with his inner darkness and is shocked by what he sees. Is that because he suddenly remembers it’s all a self-generated illusion? The final image seems to suggest his reflection disappearing from the mirror too – is that because he’s not really there?

Lastly – and this is a fairly obvious one – Travis is shot a lot. Could he really survive that many gunshot wounds?

He really does survive and become a hero

Perhaps Scorsese is arguing that life in the big city is arbitrary and we all make decisions every day that have unknown effects on our lives. If Travis wasn’t spotted at the rally, he’d now be famous on Wikipedia for being a political assassin. Instead, he falls into another path.

Or maybe the filmmakers are suggesting people have a confused idea of what evil and corruption is? Scorsese was making the film just after the resignation of Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal – if Bickle had killed a senator he’d be a murderer, by shooting more obvious criminals like Sport (Keitel) and his accomplices, he’s a hero.

In that sense it has a lot in common with ‘Natural Born Killers’, a film that writer Quentin Tarantino has often said is a comment on the way the media portrays vigilantes and turns them into celebrities. Scorsese just beat Q to it by 20 years.

The verdict

Both Scorsese and Schrader have confirmed that Travis does indeed survive and what we see is ‘real-life’.

On a Reddit AMA, Schrader said, “The epilogue is not a dream sequence, it’s just the restarting of the movie. I’ve always felt that the last frame could be spliced to the first frame and the movie started all over again.”

In other words, Bickle isn’t cured, he’s a sociopath waiting for another opportunity to explode.

Meanwhile, De Niro told The Guardian when asked about the theory, “I know that was not the intention, but it’s as valid as anything.”

In other words, it’s not what the filmmakers intended, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. As Schrader himself added, “Good movies leave themselves open for interpretation.”

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Image credits: Rex_Shutterstock, Columbia Pictures