Tools of Characterization
Characterization in Taxi Driver
Actions
If actions speak louder than words, then killing three people (or maybe four, if the thief in the convenience store ended up dying) speaks pretty loudly. That's what Travis does: He shoots people.
He also takes Betsy to a porn movie on the first date, then screams at her when she rejects him… and plots to kill her employer. We learn he's kind of violent and crazy even before he starts offing pimps.
Also, we learn things about Betsy from the way she goes out with Travis when he comes in and asks her out in a fairly unusual way. She's spontaneous, and willing to put herself into a potentially awkward situation in order to make a real connection.
Additionally, we learn that Iris wants to escape her horrible situation from the way she tries to escape in Travis' cab before Sport drags her out. She's not content, to say the least.
Clothing
Travis' Marine jacket with the King Kong Company patch shows that he still has a military mindset, even though he's no longer in the Marines or fighting in Vietnam. The war has come home with him and he sees the streets of New York as being fairly similar to the war torn jungles of Southeast Asia.
Iris dresses in a totally different way, with a wide-brimmed hat, a flowery blouse, pink shorts, and red platform shoes. (She dresses differently in the breakfast scene, wearing odd green plastic glasses). It's supposed to look fairly adult, but it ends up highlighting how young Iris really is (twelve), despite the fact she's working as a prostitute. It demonstrates her lost-ness, her innocence.
By contrast, Sport dresses in a black hat with a white brim, a wife-beater, and black pants. It's a pretty slimy tough-guy look.
Family Life
Family life is notably absent in the movie. All the characters are so lost and disconnected that they've ceased to be embedded within family life. When Travis writes an anniversary card to his parents, his note indicates how out of touch he is—he totally botches the correct date of Father's Day, and feeds his parents a bunch of lies:
"Dear Father and Mother:
July is the month I remember which brings not only your wedding anniversary but also Father's Day and Mother's birthday. I'm sorry I can't remember the exact dates, but I hope this card will take care of them all. I'm sorry again I cannot send you my address like I promised to last year. But the sensitive nature of my work for the government demands utmost secrecy. I know you will understand. I am healthy and well and making lots of money. I have been going with a girl for several months and I know you would be proud if you could see her. Her name is Betsy but I can tell you no more than that...I hope this card finds you all well as it does me. I hope no one has died. Don't worry about me. One day, they'll be a knock on the door and it'll be me.
Love Travis."
Iris is also separated from her family, claiming that they hate her and life with them was horribly boring. She seems to realize that life with Sport is far worse, though, and, when her parents pick her up after Travis kills Sport, her father hits a note of sincere gratitude, telling Travis how grateful he and Iris' mother are to have her back again.
Being restored to family life, and to some kind of real human connection, seems to be a positive thing in this movie—it's a big part of what's missing for Travis.
Food
Food doesn't necessarily say a ton about character in this movie—no one is mentioning Taxi Driver on their "Best Movies For Gourmets " listicle—but it's still a character-identifying trait.
For instance, when Travis and Betsy go for a snack, Travis says,
"I took Betsy to Charles Coffee Shop on Columbus Circle. I had black coffee and apple pie with a slice of melted yellow cheese. I think that was a good selection. Betsy had coffee and a fruit salad dish. She could have had anything she wanted."
What can this possibly say about them? Well, apple pie with a slice of melted yellow cheese is, relatively speaking, kind of a more extravagant dish than fruit salad—so maybe this contrasts Travis's personality with Betsy's in a way. (Then again, maybe she just wasn't that hungry.)
Also, there's a scene where Travis eats cereal with sugar and pours either whiskey or syrup in it too (it's hard to tell—we're guessing syrup). This is comparable to the scene where we see Iris make an incredibly sweet jelly-and-sugar sandwich. Whether you think that these cavity-inducing meal choices are representative of looking for something "sweet" in a pretty sour environment, or whether it underlines the fundamental childishness of both Iris and Travis is up to you.
One thing's for sure—these crazy kids' decision to get a week's worth of sugar into one meal speaks to the fact that Iris and Travis are, on a fundamental level, similar.
Location
As described in the setting section, the location of NYC affects characters in this movie in a big way. Principally, it makes characters... insane.
Travis rants about New York over and over again:
"Whatever it is, you should clean up this city here, because this city here is like an open sewer you know. It's full of filth and scum. And sometimes I can hardly take it. Whatever-whoever becomes the President should just [Travis honks the horn] really clean it up. You know what I mean? Sometimes I go out and I smell it, I get headaches it's so bad, you know... They just never go away you know... It's like... I think that the President should just clean up this whole mess here. You should just flush it right down the f***in' toilet."
The other characters in Taxi Driver are influenced by New York as well—Iris more easily falls into the trap of being a child prostitute in a big city like New York, and Sport is a low-life big-city underworld kind of guy. There's also a savvy political operator feel to Betsy and Tom that's pretty NYC, as well.
Occupation
The occupation that seems the most significant in this film is right in the title: taxi driver.
Travis' job serves as a metaphor for his own loneliness—he picks up passenger after passenger, but connects with approximately none of them. Also, his job allows him to pass judgment on the city, stoking his own rage, and the sense that he needs to become some sort of violently righteous avenger. As Wizard ramblingly describes it, Travis is suffering the fate of becoming his job:
"Look, look at it this way, you know uh, a man, a man takes a job, you know, and that job, I mean like that, and that it becomes what he is. You know like uh, you do a thing and that's what you are. Like I've been a, I've been a cabbie for seventeen years, ten years at night and I still don't own my own cab. You know why? 'Cause I don't want to. I must be what I, what I want. You know, to be on the night shift drivin' somebody else's cab. Understand? You, you, you become, you get a job, you you become the job."
Charles Palantine's a senator and a presidential candidate, which influences the way he acts too. Even when Travis rants about New York in a way that seems angry and unhinged, Palantine retains his composure and patiently explains what they need to do to make it better. He seems polished and unflappable.
Betsy and Tom also seems pretty savvy and with it as campaign workers—though Betsy encounters an oblivious creep (Travis) who ruins her confident expectations and her composure.
Then there's Iris and Sport. Naturally, Iris' life as a child prostitute has made her sad, discontent, and despairing. Travis urges her to confront the desperation of her condition when she calls him square:
"I'm not square. You're the one who's square. You're full of s***. What are you talking about? You walk out with those f***ing creeps... Lowlifes and degenerates out on the street...?"
On the other hand, Sport's sleaziness and total insincerity perfectly matches his job description as a pimp.
Physical Appearances
An actor friend of Martin Scorsese's, Victor Magnota, suggested that Travis wear a Mohawk cut after he decides to assassinate Palantine, based on the way certain soldiers in Vietnam cut their hair when planning on going into crazy commando situations. It's meant to show that he's really intense and unhinged—this is a pretty DIY Mohawk after all, not really a professional job.
Travis' physical appearance also reflects his own determination to get in shape and become an effective killing machine, as he discusses in his diary:
"June 29th. I gotta get in shape now. Too much sittin' is ruinin' my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on, it will be fifty push-ups each morning, fifty pull-ups. There'll be no more pills, there'll be no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on, it will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight."
Also, the women in Travis' life mirror his ideas about them. We see Betsy as Travis sees her—as an angelic goddess woman—while Iris appears as a wounded innocent girl, wearing eye shadow that, rather than making her look adult, highlights how young she is.
Sport looks like a tough guy—muscular but also thoroughly sleazy—while Wizard boasts a rumpled couch potato-esque look. Palantine is fully presidential with his clean-shaven, elder statesman look.
Props
Travis' props say a lot about him. His full arsenal of guns demonstrates that he's always ready for violence and wants to orchestrate some of his own, while the rotting flowers in his room show that he was seeking romance but failed to find it, allowing the decaying stench of what didn't happened to pollute his life.
Also, his "One of these days I'm gonna get organ-iz-iz-ed!" poster ironically comments on his deteriorating mental state. Travis is unraveling, even as he dedicates himself to an impressive body-sculpting routine.
Sex and Love
There's lots of sexual stuff implied in this movie, but we don't see any of it between the actual characters—the closest we get is in the porn movies that Travis watches.
Those movies end up preventing him from having an actual romantic and sexual relationship with Betsy, since he foolishly (not to mention crazily) takes her to one. The porn movies demonstrate the fact that he's not capable of human connection, and also show how limited his understanding of culture is:
TRAVIS: I don't know much about movies.
BETSY: This the only kind you go to?
TRAVIS: Yeah, I come — This is not so bad.
BETSY: Taking me to this place is about as exciting to me as saying, "Let's f***."
Betsy reacts the way most people probably would, but Travis is unable to see how taking a woman to a porn movie would turn her off. The gritty Time Square porn theaters are such a regular, normal part of his world he doesn't see them the way someone else might see them.
Also, Iris: Since she's a twelve-year-old prostitute, she's clearly being raped by numerous pedophiles. (This movie is so bleak, that we usually like to watch It's A Wonderful Life right afterwards in order to gain back our faith in humanity.) This, of course, is another example of sex without lasting connection. This is sex that's purely monetary, like the sex on display in the porno movies.
The illusion of romance with Sport—which is totally fake—helps keep Iris in this terrible position. Sport reveals the reality of that position with his grotesque sales pitch to Travis:
"If you want to save yourself some money, don't f*** her. Cause you'll be back here every night for some more. Man, she's twelve and a half years old. […] You can do anything you want with her."
Basically, sex always happens in an isolating way in this movie.
Social Status
Betsy and Tom seem to have a decent amount of social status, given that they're campaign workers who are doing a job that they seem invested in (and well compensated for). By contrast, Travis doesn't have much social status.
This proves isolating to Travis, since he can't connect with Betsy over a shared cultural frame of reference—he doesn't know anything about Kris Kristofferson's music when Betsy references him, and he doesn't know much about movies beyond porn. Thanks to her own lack of social status, Iris is totally at the mercy of society, trapped in a life of prostitution with no real freedom.
Speech and Dialogue
Travis' speech reveals that he really doesn't know what he's doing. His extreme naivety gushes in this speech, in which he tries to convince Betsy to go out with him again:
"Hello Betsy. Hi, it's Travis. How ya doin'? Listen, uh, I'm, I'm sorry about the, the other night. I didn't know that was the way you felt about it. Well, I-I didn't know that was the way you felt. I-I-I would have taken ya somewhere else. Uh, are you feeling better or oh you maybe had a virus or somethin', a 24-hour virus you know. It happens. Yeah, umm, you uh, you're workin' hard. Yeah. Uh, would you like to have, uh, some dinner, uh with me in the next, you know, few days or somethin'? Well, how about just a cup of coffee? I'll come by the, uh, headquarters or somethin', we could, uh...Oh, okay, okay. Did you get my flowers in the...? You didn't get them? I sent some flowers, uh...Yeah, well, okay, Okay. Can I call you again? Uh, tomorrow or the next day? Okay. No, I'm gonna… okay. Yeah, sure, okay. So long."
Travis somehow didn't realize Betsy wouldn't want to go on a first date to a porn theater, and he still doesn't fully understand what he did to turn her off. It shows just how deep his ignorance (or craziness) is. He's also trying to convince himself that Betsy was sick, and that's why she didn't want to go out with him again. Overall, it's a painful and uncomfortable revelation of his character.
Take another example: When Wizard talks, his speech reveals that he's pretty offensive—he uses the word "f**" with abandon in this section—but it mingles strangely with a kind of open-minded tolerance for personal behavior:
"Then I pick up these two f**s. They're going downtown. They're wearing rhinestone T-shirts. They start arguing, yelling. The other says, "You b****!" Starts beating him on the head. I say, "I don't care what you do in the privacy of your own home. This is an American free country. We've got a pursuit of happiness thing. You're consenting. You're adult. But in my f***ing cab, don't go busting heads. You know? God loves you. Do what you want."
This shows that Wizard is rough on the outside, but his opinions are (weirdly, given the fact that he uses a slur) pretty tolerant.
Thoughts and Opinions
Travis' thoughts and opinions demonstrate how he develops as a character over the course of the movie. Early on, he's still searching for a moral purpose and for connection with other people:
"All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention. I believe that someone should become a person like other people."
However, his rage against the city grows and grows, as he hates on New York:
"Well. Whatever it is, you should clean up this city here, because this city here is like an open sewer you know. It's full of filth and scum. And sometimes I can hardly take it. Whatever-whoever becomes the President should just [Travis honks the horn] really clean it up. You know what I mean? Sometimes I go out and I smell it, I get headaches it's so bad, you know...They just never go away you know...It's like...I think that the President should just clean up this whole mess here. You should just flush it right down the f***in' toilet."
Finally, after being rejected by Betsy, he decides the only solution to his problem is an extreme act of violence:
"The idea had been growing in my brain for some time. True force. All the king's men cannot put it back together again."
He's not even pretending to fix anything through violence either—he just wants to destroy a world that he hates. However, it ends up working out differently, when people celebrate the fact that he murdered Sport and two others.