Travis Bickle, a Taxi Driver in NYC / psychological Profile

in relation to other villains of today, was Travis Bickle crazy? was he a hero? was he a lost soul in big city? mentally injured Vietnam War veteran? a social outcast? what do you think?
IMO, he was total nut case, whose certain principles, believes and luck prevented him from becoming mass murderer like those guys of today who kill kids in schools or blow up Boston Marathon, yet system made him a hero....
.....and Martin Scorsese made a Taxi Driver a hero for disillusioned post Vietnam War generation of late 1970's with wide acceptance, but just short of making Travis Bickle a monster....
Taxi Driver with Robert De Niro is a Great Movie, a True Classic .








The Last Temptation of Travis Bickle >> Read More

Today, Martin Scorsese is considered by the majority of film critics as the greatest living American director. In a survey done in the early nineties, Raging Bull was elected as the best American film of the eighties. But it wasn't always so. In the seventies, his films had a tendency to upset as much as to be acclaimed. He was mainly criticized for his use of extreme violence, his portrayal of disturbingly unsympathetic and unredeemable characters and his morbid fascination with failure as a dramatic drive. Taxi Driver became the emblem of this negative criticism.

Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, the film celebrated its twentieth anniversary last year and remains as powerful and disturbing as ever, particularly in regard to the ambiguous ending in which psychopath taxi driver Travis Bickle survives his killing rampage. The years have elevated it to the status of an American classic. Countless hommages and tributes have been made to Taxi Driver in such recent films as Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs , Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine and Danny Boyle's Trainspotting . There is even a film whose title Are You Talkin' to Me? is a line taken from Bickle's famous monologue.

After twenty years, one would think that everything has been said about Taxi Driver . But what if there existed a new approach to the film, especially a new way to interpret the enigmatic ending that still puzzles many viewers? What if this new reading could radically change our perception of other Scorsese films? What if a continuous linkage could be thus created from Taxi Driver through The King of Comedy, After Hours, Goodfellas , all the way to the more recent Casino ? And what if the main clue bringing together all these films could be found in The Last Temptation of Christ ? This is the subject and goal of this analysis of the second ending of Taxi Driver

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