Meaning in Taxi Driver

I really liked this movie. In it, we can clearly see that Kubrick’s style and Scorsese’s style are different. Taxi Driver is a very interesting movie. We can make many interpretations of the movie’s meanings.

Travis, the movie’s protagonist, was relieved of active duty, in the Marine Corps, through the method of honorable discharge; apparently, because he is mentally unstable. He lives in New York City, working as a taxi driver. In the movie, this place is all messed up. Everyone wants a big change instantly and it’s impossible to achieve, so people gives up and doesn’t do anything to improve the city. Travis gets tired of this. He goes out to make a difference. He saves a twelve-year-old girl’s life, killing her pimp and chiefs. He makes use of violence to save her, but he doesn’t think of this as a crime. It doesn’t matter if he has to use violence to achieve this purpose. Anyways, this was what the Marine Corps taught him. The Marine Corps teaches the marines, the country’s heroes, to use violence to protect their country. He is acting just as that, as a country protector.

Travis didn’t like the world in which he lived, but he didn’t do anything to change it at the beginning. What made him go out and kill those guys? I believe that even do he was mentally unstable his most strongly motivation was his love disappointment. We can interpret that Scorsese is telling us that love is a necessity and loosing it can make someone’s mind to get unstable or more unstable than it is already as in Travis’s case.

Filming the Mean Streets

First of all, I want to say I didn’t like this movie. It just didn’t impress me.

One of the most noticeable differences between Kubrick’s and Scorsese’s style of work is the use of acting.

In “Mean Streets,” the actors perform their work more freely than they do in Kubrick’s movies. Scorsese seems to leave room for improvisation in his movies. On the other hand, Kubrick doesn’t let escape any detail in his works. He has everything meticulously planned; and he makes the actors act the way he want them to do, so his plans can’t “fail.”

Scorsese uses acting in a more realistic way than Kubrick does. This is another way in which the use of acting of both directors differs. In “Mean Streets,” the fight scenes are examples that prove this criterion. In these scenes, the actors perform a bunch of drunken people fighting; and they look exactly like that, drunken people having a fight between drunken people. They just throw punches randomly and walk like drunken people do. These fights aren’t presented in the same way as they are presented traditionally in movies. In Kubrick’s movies, acting is perfectly executed, it is an art. We can’t expect anything different from Kubrick. He is a perfectionist; everything has to be perfect and everything is.

Another noticeable fact that differ the style of work in Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” and in Kubrick’s movies is the type of message they present. Through his movies, Kubrick expresses his ideas and opinions about the world’s most controversial themes, at their time of release. In “Mean Streets,” Scorsese exposes what he saw everyday in the streets of Little Italy, where he lived when he was a boy.