Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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seedy hotel where she, as a prostitute, is with one of her clients. In this sequence, he
shoots her pimp boyfriend, the hotel owner, and Iris’s client, and each confrontation
is bloodier than the last, until the entire room is splattered with blood. Whether
called “stalker” or “slasher”, Taxi Driver adheres quite closely to the generic
formula.
This is important to establish, as Taxi Driver is an example of a film that
houses the film’s perspective tightly within the perpetrator of violent action. In fact,
only one scene in the entire film does not include Travis. Throughout Taxi Driver,
Scorsese creates unpleasant compositions using a grainy film stock mostly depicting
dark, grimy streets and harshly lit interiors. These compositions provide a sense of
Travis’s initial and increasing discomfort in New York City. The climactic shootout
in the hotel stands out from the rest of the film, particularly through its extreme use
of overhead and back lighting. The colours in that scene are also more saturated than
in the rest of the film, making the blood more striking. In the hotel scene, the viewer
gets a sense of Travis’s anger, intensity, madness and determination. The shocking
new compositions enhance this emotional reaction, and reflect the perspective of
Travis.
As discussed, Taxi Driver has retained a certain amount of generic
ambiguity, largely because of its close attachment to a character that is typically
understood as an antagonist. The same could be said of Peeping Tom (1960; dir.
Powell), which has consistently been labelled a horror film, and takes great pains to
not only assume the perspective of Mark, the killer, but to also create a tremendous
amount of sympathy for him within the viewer, largely through developing a
relatable and tragic back story. One significant difference between Taxi Driver and
Peeping Tom that may account for the former’s generic ambiguity is that in Taxi