Travis Bickle's Taxi Driver: A Hero

Taxi Driver: A Hero
In the movie Taxi Driver, there are many different views on the main character, Travis Bickle. There are different opinions on whether he is a maniac or a hero. It is hard to have a satisfying answer to this question, but it is safe to say that what he did, at least in his mind, was the right thing to do. Besides when he attempted to assassinate senator Palantine, But that was done for the movie to show a political message. That message is that sometimes political leaders are just as bad as the pimp’s and the robbers that lie, cheat, and steal. Through the movie he is always seen as an outsider, someone who doesn’t quite belong where he is. They keep referring to him as the cowboy, and how he isn’t quite normal.
In the diner on his date with Betsy she says that she has never met someone quite like him, and this really shows the character difference of his compared to all of the “scum” that he has to deal with and see run around the city on his late night shifts. This shows how he is somewhat of that cowboy sheriff in town, and in some way justifies his actions. Travis’ moment of vigilantism shows his heroism, how his actions become justified through the community and how he deserves the labeled a hero.
There have been many reviews of this film over the past thirty years, but most of them have given the same notion of how Travis loses his innocence by the ending and how monstrous a person Travis is for his vigilantism.
To me this is a narrow minded point of view, just because Travis is a normal person and kills these scumbags of New York doesn’t make him any less of a hero compared to any police officer or soldier in the army who does the same thing. The ending of Taxi driver creates an ironic twist which makes the movie what it is. In spite of his strange behavior towards Betsy, his killing a black man, attempted murder of Palantine, and the insane blood bath at the pimp 's hangout, the psychopathic Travis Bickle is still a hero showed by Iris ' parents and their letter of gratitude, as well as being cleared of all charges by the authorities. As Scorsese proclaims, "strange things, as we know, have happened in this city"(Ebert). This ironic twist was not understood by all the critics who reviewed the film at the time or since. Critics according to Ebert had rejected the film because they were unable or unwilling to understand the meaning of this ending. Most reviewers of the period condemned Scorsese for the immoral outcome of what they referred to as the second ending.(Ebert) In Newsweek, Jack Kroll expresses this feeling of misunderstanding by writing, “in their eagerness to establish rich and moral ambiguities, the Catholic Scorsese and the Calvinist
Schrader have flubbed their ending. It 's meant to slay you with irony, but it 's simply incredible." Another movie reviewer, Charles Michener, agrees by saying, "Once the exhilaration of the nightmare is over once Travis wakes up, Taxi driver takes a drastically wrong turn. Travis emerges a hero with his face in the front page of the Daily News, his rage exorcised, his violence purged” (Knight). Then Leonard Quarts, A Slice of Delirium focuses on the city and how negatively it was portrayed. “Taxi driver displays a genuine passion for a city which people either recoil from or, if having some residue for social concern, wish to make more equitable and just. Scorsese, however, exhibits no shock or revulsion with what he sees, nor does he have any interest in providing an agenda for social reform. Scorsese’s New York Glows in its meanness, Scorsese has transformed it into a metropolis, in Baudelaire’s words, whose hellish charm resuscitates” (Quart).
But such a narrow-minded perception does not take into account Scorsese 's configuration of Travis ' character flaws and controversial behaviors.
The positive reviews of the film were more subtle in their appreciations and saw the ending as a social metaphor. Pauline Kael is one of the first critics to take Scorsese 's side in the debate. Quoted from the New Yorker, "This film doesn 't operate on the level of moral judgment of what Travis does. Rather, by drawing us into his vortex it makes us understand the psychic discharge of the quiet boys who go berserk. And it 's a real slap in the face for us when we see Travis at the end looking pacified. He 's got the rage out of his system for the moment at least and he 's back at work, picking up passengers in front of St-Regis. It 's not that he 's cured but that the city is crazier than he is"(Caron). This reading is supported by Michael Henry, "Never has society showed so much attention to Travis. Having shaved his head like a Mohawk Indian as if to rekindle the purity of America 's aboriginal origins, he finds himself recognized, renowned and in the end assimilated to his contemporaries of the silent majority"(Caron). We see that although these two critics see the irony of Taxi driver they still saw the ending literally. But for film critic Jack Kroll of Newsweek, "it is simply incredible when Travis is hailed a hero after the slaughter, despite the fact he 'd been armed like a weapons platoon and had previously been
spotted, Mohawk haircut and all, by the Secret Services"(Knight). It doesn 't make sense if the ending is to be taken literally, but it does fit perfectly within Travis ' cleansing of the New York scum in which he must be the hero. Not everyone might agree with this based on their morals and values, but one must look at the context of the situation he was in and how what he did was the right thing for the young prostate and her family. And another thing to look at was how his actions were affirmed by Iris’ parents and even the police and local paper. The reason I feel people have a problem with labeling him as a hero is because of their own religious values. The fact that he killed those people and then attempted suicide shows how he’s not a hero and how a hero would not want to kill themselves, but that’s the beauty of the movie, he did not know that he was even a hero, he didn’t realize this until the end, where we still did not get a solid answer from himself. Yet, there still is a subtle message at the end of the film that shows how he thinks of himself as a hero. In the last scene where he picks up Betsy and then drops her off like a regular passenger shows how he was holding his head high and how he knew that he is now seen as a hero. Even the way that she talked to him and what she said showed she saw him and what he did as a greatly brave act of heroism. She talked and looked at him like he was a different person; she did not realize what he stood for before, but now that she knows form the newspaper story that he is a person that really cares about others she gives him the recognition of a hero. Then when he dropped her off it gave that persona that he had somewhere to go somebody to save and that he didn’t have time at the moment for her. Even though he was only a cab driver it left much to the imagination to what he was going to do next. And then he rolls off into the fog, almost too perfect of a scene to create a motif of the hero cowboy at the end of any western movie, finally, in peace.

Works Cited
Caron, Andre. "The Temptation of Travis Bickle." Hors Champ. Web. 25 Oct. 2011. .
Ebert, Roger."Taxi driver.” Movie Reviews, Essays and the Movie Answer Man from Film
Critic Roger Ebert. 25 Oct. 2011..
Knight."Taxi driver as Radicalized Film Noir." Scribd. 25 Oct. 2011.
Quart, Leonard. "A Slice of Delirium: Scorsese 's Taxi driver Revisited." Film Criticism 19.3 (1995): 67-71. Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text. EBSCO.