Taxi Driver -- the Narrative of Belonging
Taxi Driver -- the Movie
Martin Scorsese released Taxi Driver, his fifth feature film in 1976, but many regard it as his first masterpiece. Taxi Driver has been described as "one man's (a social outsider's) private diary of loneliness and despair" (Laviola, 2011, p. 1).
Travis Bickle is in charge of his own destiny, but he is consumed with a near overwhelming sense of paranoia that Scorsese illustrates several times in the film (Fisher, 2009). Paranoia qua paranoia is a lonely disorder that establishes and maintains a sense of not belonging anywhere -- no one can be trusted. Travis develops a fierce resolve to rescue Iris, the adolescent prostitute (played amazingly by Jodie Foster at age thirteen), from her pimps and drugs (Fisher, 2009). In this determination to carry out his moral mission, Travis has created for himself an opportunity for regenerative violence (Laviola, 2011, p. 1).
In two scenes in particular, Scorsese may have taken some stylistic inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni that makes Travis's social isolation particularly salient...
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