Taxi Driver Movie Analysis

The former chapter was about individual models which make Travis Bickle and his loneliness, but this chapter is about the society which alienated him. Taxi Driver was released in 1976, and behind it, there is the social background of the United States from 1960s to 1970s.

The main character, Travis Bickle lives in New York, the United States in the 1970s, when there were incidents related to Taxi Driver. According to Iannucci, “Historically, Taxi Driver appeared after a decade of war in Vietnam (1976), and after the Watergate crisis and subsequent resignation of Nixon.” In this way, those incidents influenced in some parts of the film, at the same time, Travis’ loneliness was also influenced by those social situations.

Those important incidents, which had influences in the society, from 1960s to 1970s are roughly separated into two parts, the Vietnam War and political instability.

The first, the United States has already intervened in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, and then United States Armed Forces still continued to fight in the early 1970s. They were finally defeated at the Fall of Saigon in 1975, because of domestic public opinion against the Vietnam War. In those days, the United States society certainly changed from the 1950s, when Travis was born and raised in.

The latter, Travis was influenced by political instability, which were in the United States society in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Martin Luther King was also