The opening shot of Taxi Driver plays probably the most seductive of trumps in the recent craze for power totems that has overtaken the American screen…. Out of a cloud of steam gushing over a New York street, a yellow cab floats majestically, mysteriously forward, its foreboding trajectory paced to the growling thunder of [the] score, its surface awash with abstract patterns of neon light. The powerful physicality of the image, and the state of extreme dislocation which it conveys, are the key to a kind of muscle-flexing sense of paradox on many levels: the film is about the soul sickness of urban alienation, played out … as a series of extrovert power plays involving American myths of gunmanship and Ideal Womanhood; its mood is one of determinist doom, feverishly embraced …; and, following from this, its method is to construct a series of steel traps for its hero, all of which have firmly shut before the film is half over, though Scorsese's grandstanding style and Schrader's Bressonian pretensions continue to push for moments of religious transcendence. What is locked tightest into the contradiction, and most disturbingly into the film, is a confusion between objective and subjective viewpoints…. [A] strong streak of misogyny and racist sentiment (women are principally identified by Travis with betrayal; blacks with the irredeemable otherness and corruption of the city) often seems to be floating through the film, unattached to the protagonist. In one sequence, however, the two viewpoints are neatly crystallised as subjective effect flows from objective (not to say ironically distanced) scene-setting. Immediately after he makes his stormy break with Betsy, Travis is seen stopping with a passenger at an address, where the latter (played by Scorsese himself) proceeds to rant about his wife and the black man she is with in an upstairs window, insisting that Travis look, while the camera almost reluctantly pans up the building until it locks on to the window where the two icons of the hero's paranoid imaginings are shadowily visible. But for the most part, the subjective portions of the film remain pyrotechnical effects, Scorsese playing true to the purgatory of his character's mind by painting New York as a garish, otherworldly landscape, while objectively little is said about Travis' mental state…. One can sense Scorsese trying to forge a connection between … disparate episodes, to create a context like the vicious circles of family, religion and criminal code in Mean Streets, or the emotional entanglements of Alice which would sustain his characters. But Travis remains a rather desperately willed figure, and various iconography (the candles that blaze devotionally in Iris' room during her first conversation with Travis), parallels (between Betsy and Iris), and continuities (the Bressonian play with hands) stay persistently on the surface. Most crippling is the ending, in which the macho movie cliché of the heroine who returns to the hero once his capacity for purgative violence has been revealed is crossed with the film's vaguest gesture of empathy with Travis. Now at peace with his most destructive instincts, he simply disappears into another hallucinogenic light and colour painting of the New York streets. (p. 201)