Is Travis dead or not? I have an answer, but I don't want to impose it on someone who prefers an alternative interpretation. But I think the image of Travis walking beneath the awning of the St. Regis hotel is rather conclusive while also being brilliantly esoteric; in other words, if you really deeply care, you will investigate the significance of this clue: I looked up St. Regis (It only took me my umpteenth instance of viewing Taxi Driver to finally do it). And guess what? (This was particularly exciting for me) - St. Regis “is best known for his convert work amongst prostitutes.” From The Real Presence Eucharistic Education and Adoration Association:
I suppose that in most short biographies of John Francis Regis, he is best known for his convert work amongst prostitutes. Needless to say, he was very successful. He recognized most of them were not in the business, so to speak, because they liked it, but they were poor. How I wish we had at least a half a dozen Francis Regis’ in New York. Any one day, so the figures, that I've learned go, there are ten thousand women walking the streets of New York City and many are young, no home, no money, no friends, with all the consequences that follow. He was it seems, all his life answering complaints; people criticized or complained about his work. They didn't like this and they didn't like that. He'd always have a pat answer. It was told him, ‘Look, these people you are “converting” the conversion won't last.’ His answer was, “so what, if I can keep a person from committing one sin that except for my efforts they would have committed, it's worth all my effort.”
After the bloodbath in the tenement brothel, after the bravura overhead shot looking down at the killing (fucking) room (Iris is weeping, Travis, shot multiple times, sits on the couch, the Old Man -the timekeeper- collapsed on the floor, and the john splayed out before the entrance) with the police standing in the doorway, the camera glides down the hallway, past the testimony of carnage: the plasma-misted walls, drips and drops of blood, Sport's crumpled body; and eventually exits the building where an assembly of rubberneckers are intermittently illuminated by the blue and red lights of police vehicles. Dissolve.
This is where the coda begins, and the grounds of reality become tenuous: a bulletin board is plugged with a newspaper article about the 'cabbie who saved a youth from gangsters' complete with a graph depicting the architectural layout of the tenement/abattoir; next to the article is a hand-written letter to Travis from Iris's parents; the contents of the letter are dictated blandly by the voice of a rustic older man, Iris's father, thanking Travis; Travis engages in chit-chat with Wizard, Charlie T, and Doughboy in front of the cab-stand (status quo has been restored); Travis says so long and walks to his cab, passing beneath the portentously framed St. Regis awning; he does not act too startled to find Betsy, the woman he idolized, sitting in the back seat of the cab with moony eyes full of appreciation; he acts cool; we see her only in the rearview - her head is abstracted, lit in a surreal fashion - and this is what keyed me in to the dubiousness of whether any of this was actually happening, even on the first viewing. The surreal countenance of Betsy, her belated appreciation of Travis, the fact that he asks for no payment for the taxi ride (where he's going or where he is, he won't need money), the look of relieved satisfaction on his face as he relishes Betsy's flirtations and recognition of who he really is, and the final touch, his abrupt vanishing into the night air, all convince me that the coda of Taxi Driver is a sort of netherworld of solace and peace for our friend, misunderstood for so long, his righteousness finally vindicated. Travis was too good for this world. And his martyrdom has been secured.
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