Taxi Driver Film Questions

1. The film, Taxi Driver, is about a regular taxi driver, Travis Bickle, played by Robert DeNiro who is trying desperately to make a living in New York and hopefully find someone to love. The film takes an awkward turn when he gets dumped by a girl, Betsy, he meets who works in for the one of the presidential candidates. Travis realizes that he as nothing left to do with his own life and is going to take the one chance he has at getting her back, assassinating the presidential candidate. This film shows the seedier side to the 1970s. It takes a darker point of view of 70s life of strip clubs, crime, murder, prostitution, and politics. I'm not saying this is how the 70s were, but this is Scorsese's interpretation of the grimier side of the decade. Not many films look at that part.
The films about the 1970s that we typically see, hell, films of almost any decade that we see are typically brighter in terms of the plot line, and this film completely doesn't do that. Everyone down to the main character is an anti-hero. You want to root for them, but they're such bad characters in their own ways, that we really can't relate to them or even root for them. We just sit and watch, and that's what is special about this film. It captures a different side of the decade, the side we read about in the newspapers or see on the news. And it was one of the first films to do this. It's captivating.

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3. Basing off what I said in the second paragraph of the first question, I do believe this film should be listed as one of the top 100 films ever produced in the US. This film was a completely original look at a horrible event that fictitiously happened. We have had films before all based on the cops or the heroes of a certain event, but this one looked at the bad guy. Not that he was a complete bad guy, but Travis Bickle was a misunderstood character. He was the first film anti-hero. The film showed the decline of the common working man. It was a semi-realistic take about a man who thought he had nothing in his life, and went on to do something about it...although he definitely did not do it in the proper way. When Travis talks to the secret service agent at the first speech by the candidate, he seems polite, but we know as the audience, that Travis is planning something diabolical and cannot be trusted, but we still want to see him accomplish something.
The way the film was filmed is another reason it should be listed. I loved the noir-ish feel of the film, with Travis' semi-constant inner monologue talking about how he feels, what he did, etc. It was a dark film, sort of hard to follow, but DeNiro's narration served as a guide to the characters slow demise into obscurity. A specific scene to look at in this film is when Travis is driving his cab at night, picking up street scum and narrating how he cannot sleep, and is slowly being fed up with society. These scenes are a cornerstone into the mind of the character, and probably many Americans who felt unimportant in that era.

4. The final scenes in the film signify the emptiness of the era. I'll relate this to another film we watched, Saturday Night Fever, where all John Travolta's character wants to do is dance, because there is nothing for him to do in life. He is lost, just like Travis. These final moments glorify Travis because, although he attempts to assassinate the candidate, he ends up fighting off street scum such as pimps and drug dealers and becomes a hero because of it. He accomplishes something better in his life than what he tried to do, but all this is because of the emptiness he felt being in society.
This relates to Bruce Shulman's quote, "What kind of nation has America become?" America is lost in themselves. They have pulled out of Vietnam, not a win nor a loss, and are just sitting in an age of blandness and contemptness. America had no self identity.