[Taxi Driver] is, in part, a film about films. But it is unusual in being expressive of, and simultaneously about, a particular kind of film, which might be called "the pornography of violence." Through the windshield of Travis Bickle's cab, the audience sees the repeated image of movie marquees. Through most of the film, these marquees advertise erotic films, displaying titles like "Swedish Marriage Manual" or "Anita Nymphet." But after the film's bloody catharsis, and subsequent apotheosis of Travis, as a vigilante hero, the surrealistic street scene behind the closing credits reveals marquees, which contain the following camera-selected fragments, "Charles Bronson," "Mafia," "Blood," and "Killer." Although the cathartic scene of Taxi Driver includes the bloody killing of a "mafioso," the effect of the film is far different from that of other vigilante films, such as the Bronson vehicle, Death Wish. Scorsese [and coscreenwriter Paul Schrader] … present a protagonist with whom the audience will initially identify, but from whom they will unexpectedly be jolted into alienation. The alienation effect differentiates the film from the Violence genre, upon which it comments, and is achieved through the metamorphosis of Travis from a figure of naturalistic film fantasy to a horrifyingly familiar image of media "reality." After his brief incarnation as a political assassin, Travis returns in the final scene to the conventional hero image, which the audience is unexpectedly and uncomfortably forced to reject.

In this alternation between fantasy, truth, and fantasy, the film makes certain "connections," (one of its recurrent terms) between subjective aspects of contemporary culture and specific events of recent history. The overt externalizing of fantasy differentiates a psychotic person from a normal person. (pp. 109-10)

In Taxi Driver, however, the hero is only "partly fiction."… When Travis crosses the line from fiction to truth, he also traverses the line from hero to villain. Early in the film Travis has an innocent twelve-year old boy look, as he observes Manhattan corruption through his cab windshield. When Travis courts Betsy, this boyish sweetness blends with the manly toughness of the conventional, "realistic," film hero. (p. 110)

But at a political rally for a Presidential candidate, Travis appears with a literally new face. After seeing the cab door open, the camera follows the recognizable blue jeaned legs of the hero for a few steps before it stops. The camera then moves slowly upward to the familiar marine jacket with the "We are the People" button, before it dramatically reveals Travis transformed into a sort of Charles Manson-Mr. Hyde, complete with Mohawk haircut and uncharacteristic sunglasses. When Travis moves through the crowd toward the senator, the audience is in a familiar visual territory, but not one they are accustomed to seeing on a large screen. The grin on Travis's face comes from television or magazine images, rather than cinematic convention, especially in its resemblance to the halloween mask expression of [George] Wallace-assailant, Arthur Bremer. (p. 111)

In Taxi Driver, the usual Manichean pitting of good guy against bad guy is replaced by a quasi-religious sense of the inadequacy of all moral definition. We do not know how to receive Travis at the end of the film. The protagonists of most popular violent films resemble the vigilante hero that the newspapers have made of Travis. Moral definition is provided by the media. The television and movie screens have replaced the church in satisfying our simultaneous needs for limitless transcendence and secure moral definition. Taxi Driver breaks through these moral limits, and their reinforcing aesthetic convention by allowing Travis to assume, simultaneously, the roles of the conventional hero and the ultimate modern villain; in Travis, the cowboy and the terrorist are cubistically fused.

A sense of surrealistic fantasy and moral indefiniteness is communicated in the continual movement of the New York street scenes. There is a basic "disparity" between the symbolic atmosphere of these scenes and the naturalistic tone of the scenes, which include dialogue. This disparity helps to create the alienation effect which differentiates Taxi Driver from the genre films it obliquely reflects…. The film is a fantasy looking-glass, which most of us will not go through. But it is about a man who begins as a viewer of life, through the "screen" of his cab window, and who then goes through the looking glass to become an "actor" in a personal fantasy, where he paradoxically achieves that more vital reality, which the film "viewer" theoretically craves. Before the actual film begins in the cab dispatcher's office, the last scene on the titles discloses a reddish, surrealistic scene of endless lines of traffic and pedestrians, an overwhelming, anonymous monotony, which the color scheme identifies as a hell, containing sufferers groaning for redemption. (pp. 113-14)

The various fantasies are expressed against a New York background, which virtually necessitates escapism, in an atmosphere of imminent apocalypse, like the Los Angeles of [John Schlesinger's] Day of the Locust. Rushing columns of pedestrians and automobile traffic become oppressively repetitious. Certain images accentuate this effect: rain and wet streets, the motion of windshield wipers, the clicking of the taxi meter, the dancing of red, green, and blue lights on the cab windshield. The sameness, the nightmarish blending of colors and forms, stimulates a yearning for transcendental singularity and order. (p. 116)

Travis's vague physical ailments are never defined, and his spiritual malaise is not realistically motivated. As far as we know, Travis is simply unable to accept the lesser satisfactions that might be available to him. His refusal to accept the imperfections of life-as-it-is, expresses a universal and timeless discontent. (p. 117)

Redemption from [the] "mass" becomes Travis's obsession. When he cannot redeem himself, through Betsy as his savior, Travis attempts to integrate the redeemer into himself by saving the twelve-year old prostitute, Iris, from "the life."… Travis wishes to redeem his humanity from the mechanization that civilized life imposes. Iris represents, to Travis, the complete identification of a person with his job, to which Wizard had earlier referred, "a man takes a job … that job becomes what he is." She is no more than a depersonalized sexual machine, just as the driver is only an extension of his taxi. In fastening on the pimps, Travis has found a symbolic target for his rage against the restrictions on individual development, which civilization requires. Everyone in the film, except Travis, is a recognizable urban "type." The temporary selection of Senator Palantine as a target, helps to suggest that Travis's rage represents the eternal attack on civilization by its discontents, the individual striving for completion, against the conformity-requiring authority of the superego. The word, "palatine," means "chief minister of the empire." Travis is angry at the depersonalizing quality of civilization itself.

The hero, who is almost martyred for us in Taxi Driver, is a scapegoat for our own rage, and the film suggests that our real-life criminals serve much the same purpose. (pp. 118-19)

Travis hears the unconsciously hypocritical Senator tell a TV interviewer that he wants to "let the people rule," that the people are already "beginning to rule" and that this grass roots emergence "will rise to an unprecedented swell." Travis's aspiration to individual "rule" will also reach an unprecedented swell, to be released in the orgasmic shootout with the enslaving forces, who possess Iris. Although Travis's violence is a result of sexual repression, this sexual deprivation is a metaphor for a spiritual deprivation in modern life, which intensifies the pressure for transcendental "rule." Even if their physical needs are satisfied, the people can never quite "rule," because of reduced individual expression, in an increasingly complex civilization. And the more structured a civilization becomes, the greater will be the risk of apocalyptic violence, under the appropriate name of "liberation." Travis's past as a Vietnam combat veteran has an obvious thematic correspondence to his crusade to liberate Iris, who makes it very clear that she does not want to be liberated. During their breakfast together, Iris says that her Pimp, Sport … may have a few faults, but he has never beaten her, and she is quite happy in "the life." Travis cannot accept this; he tells her what a girl-her-age should be doing and is adamant in refusing to see Sport as anything less than the worst "sucking scum." This corresponds to America's refusal to see that a different style of living, or system of government, is not necessarily evil, and that the people who live under this system do not necessarily feel oppressed. But the film suggests that Americans, who "feel" oppressed, simply by living in a populous, mechanically structured civilization, are likely to be stirred by the cause of "freedom," although the freedom they crave is psychological or even spiritual, rather than social and political.

At the end of the climactic shootout, the palpitating music, the overhead view of the sprawled bodies in Iris's slowly revolving room, the statue-like stance of the policemen with guns drawn, and the gradual descent down the apartment stairway transforms the dominant naturalistic tone of the film into an unexpectedly complete surrealism. The emphasis on the amount of blood glistening on the walls, accompanied by the music, and the slow motion camera movement, makes the blood symbolic. A purifying "liberation" has occurred. (pp. 119-20)