more Taxi Driver

After looking at a few reviews of Taxi Driver I noticed two things - I missed a few facts, for instance that Travis was in Vietnam. That one means he is not a recent foreigner ... perhaps his parents were immigrants? Whatever, he's "alientated", same thing just about. More importantly, all the reviews talk about how "controversial" the movie is, failing to notice a simple fact: Travis is in a sense very conservative. He cares about Iris because what she does is no-good, and he wants to save her; the woman he is in love with is aligned with the would-be president and represents civility - even though he does not know that this is why he is in love with her rather than with someone from his own economic class.

These are the words that reveal his ambition: "All my life needed was a sense of direction, a sense of someplace to go. I do not believe one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, but should become a person like other people." That's it. And he goes through hell to achieve that. Although he ironically becomes a taxi driver, i.e. he becomes his job just like Wizard says everyone does, he actually realises his ambition through caring and real desires and wants, not through watered down ideas - or as seems to be the case with Wizard and the other cabbies, without having any ambition. At the end he has parts of his life both in heaven and hell.

Ultimately the question I find is: how would an alienated guy in that situation, with a disposition to rise and be more than he is but without any obvious connections or know-how in life, act and behave, on condition he maintains integrity? An honest answer is: by resorting to violence. I was in two minds whether his negative views of scum and women are at the root of this problem, but after remembering that he was going to kill Palantine as well I decided no, that's not it.

So the question shouldn't be "Is he psychotic?" (these days called "antisocial personlity disorder" - but undeterminable anyway if you want to go the clinical route, because there's too little information), but rather how do people manage not to behave this way? He has nowhere to pump his energy into, and as society turns his back on him his good intentions become aggression. Simple really.