Taxi Driver and the Last Days of New York City
Photograph by Annie Millman, featuring Sam Leahy
Last February, in the dwindling months before NYC went into lockdown, my friend and I decided to start seeing classic films in theaters. We’d gone across Manhattan, skipping past the AMC or Regal Theaters, and tried our luck at smaller gems littered throughout the city. There aren’t that many movie theaters in New York that show non-blockbuster or non-family films without restricted access, like the movies shown at film festivals; the theaters that do unfortunately don’t have the financial support that mass audiences at commercial theaters have, or the support of the critics and filmmakers that frequent smaller circles of festivals. But when there is a theater like that, it’s nothing short of amazing; we’d found one on Greenwich street, an arthouse theater called IFC theater. We struck gold on Valentine’s Day when the IFC announced that they’d be showing classic films for students. The tickets were cheap, even if we could only buy them at the door; the seats were decent, and we’d decided to visit the theater in the evening.
IFC was an experience. It wasn’t only the staff, who were willing to talk about cinema; it wasn’t only the cafe with actual coffee and not vending machines with fruity pebbles in them; it was just the feeling of everyone in the theater. No one checked their phone at the theater, the blue light flashing as the film would start; no one brought crying children and grumbling relatives; it felt like a way that film should be appreciated, like that of a museum visit; everyone came there for a reason—to experience cinema.
It was pretty strange, then, because out of all the classic films that were showing—Casablanca, West Side Story, Barry Lyndon, Vertigo, and The Sound of Music, to name a few—we wanted to see a relatively “modern” classic out of the lineup. We’d been at the front atrium for about thirty minutes, deciding which film to watch when my friend had an idea. We didn’t want to see The Sound of Music or Casablanca again—those films, though ubiquitous masterpieces, had played on the screens of restaurants, rainy school days, and casual television for ages. We wanted to see a neo classic of sorts, something that our grandparents, perhaps, went to watch with our parents in the 70s or 80s, with slightly disgruntled cynicism.
The only problem was that the film we were thinking about was rated R. We’d gone from our high school directly to the theater, so we were still carrying our school bags—it all felt slightly comical, like a B rated pseudo-espionage movie destined to flop at the box office. But it worked out in the end. We bought the tickets to see Casablanca, which was showing in a Theater 1; then, we took a fork and feigned a bathroom visit and snuck into Theater 5, the one in the very back of IFC, to jazz tunes and a gritty 70’s New York City We’d made it to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
I have a feeling the IFC staff knew that we were sneaking in. They didn’t seem to care, though, because Scorsese is Scorsese and Taxi Driver is Taxi Driver—we made our way into Theater 5 without much fuss, and went up to the seventh aisle, right in the middle.
There were no ads before Taxi Driver. The seats were plush, and with a hard-wood backbone, and with no reclining option so that the nearest Tarantino aficionado wouldn’t have the luxury of a foot-view. The lights dimmed, and we sat in the darkened theater as the world of the gritty city streets with pimps and prostitutes and jazz noir swept us into the world of Travis Bickle: his yellow cab, his morose obsessions, and into the depths of his mind.
After it was done and we sat through the credits and exited the theater, I thought about New York in 1976, and New York in 2020; it all seemed hazingly familiar and all too real; wandering the city at night as fluorescent lights and rain steams window panes; rats that scuffle through streets and bodegas and creepy catcallers and taxi cabs with the touch of an all-too common psychosis through us all; and the loneliness of it all: "Loneliness [that] has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape.”
Taxi Driver was the last movie I saw in theaters. I still have the Casablanca tickets that we never used. It’s been nearly a year since I’ve gone to school, been nearly a year since I’ve bought tickets and stupidly snuck into R rated films with friends, been nearly a year since I’ve roamed the streets and explored the next neighborhood; it’s been nearly a year since the coronavirus really started up. And through last February to now, I rarely see people out, hailing cabs; I rarely see the signature yellow streaks through the city anymore. But I still see the grittiness of it all, of businesses shuttered and closed, of homeless people camping up on terraces, and in my classes, despondent faces caged in through boxes, with mute, unmute, join, and leave; I see loneliness and psychosis and schizophrenia and everything in the mind of Travis Bickle that I’d wish I’d understood before I needed to.
And yet when I find myself at 3 a.m. wishing for a friend; for a movie theater to go to, for school to go back in person, I find myself watching Taxi Driver and the jazz tunes and growing psychosis strangely comforts me. It’s not a happy tale; once the credits roll and you think of one ending that it shows you, you think again and realize the larger truth; it’s all "part truth, part fiction... a walking contradiction" and later into the night once you’re home from the cinema, you understand what really happened at the end. I don’t find myself expecting a happy ending to COVID. Nor to what lockdown and isolation is doing to everyone; none of it can ever possibly be as neatly packaged into a film. But I can see that evening clearly—I’m with a friend, and we’re at a movie theater, and we smile at our mismatched tickets as the screen fades to black and the film starts rolling.