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Travis Bickle in the Film Taxi Driver
Michelle Pio
Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" presents the viewer with a disturbing and violent
vision of urban America in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. On the surface “Taxi
Driver,” as Josh Cabrita says, is about an “alienated man on the brink of psychological
collapse,” but he goes on to say that the film is “more profoundly a critique of the
political landscape in the 1970’s and the myths of American society.” Travis Bickle, the
protagonist, is a Vietnam veteran who finds himself adrift in the urban wasteland of the
1970s. He struggles with insomnia and an overwhelming sense of isolation that leads him
to roam the streets that he loathes as a graveyard shift taxi driver. On his nightly
odysseys he becomes an observer commenting on the new, post-Vietnam America that he
sees but cannot fully understand.
The primary reason for this is that Travis lacks the ability to empathize with
others. As far as he is concerned, he is, as he puts it at one point, “God’s lonely man.” In
other words, he is a solitary avenging angel whose purpose is to somehow redeem those
who cannot seem to redeem themselves. To underscore this, Scorsese’s film is viewed
entirely through Travis’s eyes. His is the only perspective through which we ...