The Other In Taxi Driver Essay, Research Paper
“The Other” is a theme, motif or figure which seems to appear over
and over in the movie. It could be nature, women, other races, other
cultures, homosexuals, criminals, rulers, Gods, monsters, etc. In the film,
the protagonist becomes just like “The Other” in order to resolve the
problem. Usually, “The Other” is killed by the protagonist at the end of
the movie. “The Other” is always the victim in the movie, it is a
scapegoat: it is the focus of the resolution of the problems. In “Taxi
Driver”, “The Other”, according to me, is two elements: women an criminals
(gangsters). In the beginning of the film, the protagonist, Travis Bickle
falls in love with a woman who works for Palantine as a volunteer. After
going out with each other for a couple of times, the woman decides not to
see Travis again. Travis says that she’s just like the others, meaning just
like all the other women. In order to take revenge, he tries to assassinate
Palantine in front of her. “The other” also appears as gangsters in the
movie. Travis, in order to eliminate them, becomes a criminal just like
them. Therefore in “Taxi Driver”,we see two good examples of “The Other”.
In “Taxi Driver” we see that Travis Bickle still has an identity
forming problem, or I might say that he has unconsciously formed an
identity during his childhood, but he’s trying to find it. It was his
curiosity about his identity that was giving him problems to sleep.
Basically, his identity should be formed based on his father’s identity,
but nothing is obvious. Whoever his (Travis) model was, planted the
confidence in Travis to form his identity. For example, if our parents
don’t tell us in early our childhood about a certain quality that we have,
we
a good example of “identity and rivalry”. After Travis based his identity
upon his model, he started a competition with his model, he tried to do
something that his model wouldn’t have done: he went out there and killed
the gang members.
In “Taxi Driver”, we get introduced to two types of women: “the
good girl” and “the bad girls”. Both of them are introduced in the
beginning of the movie, but the first one, “the bad girl”, appears more
frequently in the first part of the movie. She is the one that Travis
desires, the one that he would like to go to bed with. He even takes her
out to an X-rated movie. this, of course, is way of saying let’s get laid.
He might have done it unconsciously, but it is obvious that he desired her.
Although we are introduced to “the good girl” in the beginning of the film,
She appears towards the end of it. She is introduced to us as a hooker,
getting into Travis’ cab by saying: “get me out of here”. Now, we all know
that hookers make part of “the bad girls”, but according to Travis, she’s
not. She’s the girl that he wants to help, he would do anything to get her
out of her miseries, so he does: he goes and eliminates the gang members
that have control over her. Therefore, here we have a perfect example of
“Madonna/Whore Complex”.
“Taxi Driver” is a film that doesn’t have only one end. Certain
events bring an end to story, where everything goes back to normality. The
first event is when Travis tries to assassinate Palantine. The second one
is when he takes out all the gang members in the building to save “the good
girl”, and the third is when “the bad girl” gets into his cab, and he
completely ignores her because he has gotten over it.