“You talkin' to me?”

Surface meaning

Travis Bickle asks his own reflection whether it is speaking to him, repeating the question back and forth as if someone else were in the room. On its face, the line is nothing more than a man rehearsing a confrontation that has not happened yet.

Cinematic context

Travis is alone in his apartment, practicing with the gun he has bought and the arsenal of straps and rigs he has built for himself. There is no other person present, and no other person he is actually addressing. Robert De Niro plays the moment as a kind of performance within the performance, Travis auditioning a tougher version of himself in the mirror before he has to become that version in public.

Deeper meaning

The scene works because it shows a man constructing an identity out of nothing but isolation and imagination. Travis has no one to talk to, so he invents an antagonist, then invents himself as the kind of man who would not back down from one. The menace in the line is aimed less at an imaginary enemy than at Travis himself, a rehearsal for the violence he is talking himself into. It is a portrait of loneliness curdling into self-mythology, which is exactly the arc Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader trace through the rest of the film.

Pop-culture legacy

The line sits at number ten on the American Film Institute’s list of the hundred greatest movie quotes, and it has become shorthand for a certain kind of coiled, paranoid masculinity. It gets quoted, parodied, and referenced far beyond film circles, often stripped of its context and used as a generic tough-guy line rather than the symptom of isolation it actually is in Taxi Driver.

Improvisation

De Niro has said the words were not fully scripted, and that he drew on his own experience with people who talk to themselves to build the moment. The repetition and the shifting tone across each delivery came out of that process on set rather than off the page.

Misquotation

The line is often remembered as a single defiant challenge, but in the film Travis runs through it several times, testing different inflections like an actor searching for the right take. That repetition is part of what makes the scene disturbing rather than simply cool.