Shine Before the Fall: Travis Bickle and the Polish That Prepares a Man for Chaos
There’s a moment in the iconic 70s movie Taxi Driver that slips quietly between the more iconic scenes: the mohawk, the “You talkin’ to me?”, the final eruption of violence. It’s easy to forget, but once you rewatch it, and if you are a boots fan like me, you can’t unsee how he polishes his boots.
Travis Bickle, alone in his apartment, sits on the floor with two tins of boot polish: one colored, one neutral. He opens them, strikes a flame, and lets both polishes burn. The wax liquefies and shimmers under the heat, a bit dangerous, almost ceremonial. Then, as if he’s taming something volatile inside himself, he extinguishes the flames with the tin lids, flips one lid over to hold a thin pool of water, wets a cotton cloth, and mixes everything: water, fire-softened polish, pigment, and neutral shine, into one swirling substance he works into the leather of his combat boots.
This is not simply a man cleaning footwear. It’s Travis Bickle preparing for war.
Travis is impulsive, paranoid, emotionally isolated… yet here, in this tiny ritual, he shows a kind of precision bordering on reverence. For a character ruled by intrusive thoughts and violent fantasies, the boot-polishing sequence is the closest thing he has to order.
And perhaps that’s exactly what he is. De Niro crafted Travis with the paranoia, loneliness, and disjointed morality of a man unmoored after Vietnam. He has always been drawn to characters who need rituals to keep themselves from falling apart. Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull tightens his fists with the same care Travis uses on leather. Even Jimmy Conway from Goodfellas has that quiet, chilling composure before violence, the tidy adjust-the-collar, smooth-the-jacket calm that precedes chaos.
He even burns the dried flowers he once meant to give Betsy. The softer version of himself literally going up in smoke. The romance dies, the fantasy dies, and what remains is the hardened version of the man he thinks he needs to be. As the flames rise, he transitions from rejected cabbie to self-appointed avenger, and the boots, well-shined, militaristic, and with a knife crudely wrapped in painter’s tape, are part of that identity, and of course, crowned by his infamous mohawk.
You start to wonder: did men in the 70s really not question behavior like this? Or have we just grown so accustomed to Travis that we forgot how unhinged he truly is?
He’s the kind of character who shouldn’t inspire imitation, and yet here we are, watching him liquefy polish over an open flame and thinking: maybe he’s onto something. Maybe there’s a raw honesty in shining your boots with that mix of fire, water, wax, and madness. I can’t help but want to polish my own boots his way.
