NEO-NOIR. TAXI DRIVER.

Taxi Driver was directed by Martin Scorsese and was released in 1976. It follows Travis Bickle ( Robert De Niro), a Vietnam veteran with a low opinion of the world. He suffers from insomnia so gets a job at a taxi rank working long 14 hour night shifts. One of his fairs, Betsy (Cybill Shepard), catches the eye of Bickle and he manages to arrange a date with her. Being so detached from the world, both emotionally and socially, he takes her to his favourite day light past time, the porno theatre. Betsy is extremely offended and leaves right away. Being disgusted with what he sees on the streets, Bickle becomes vigilante, he plans to kill the senator. A theme from a typical film noir is paranoia and Bickle being a Vietnam veteran, it's understandable why he would be paranoid. In Vietnam some of the soldiers took drugs such as Speed to stay awake long periods of time in fear of getting poked to death by a big nasty Vietnamese bayonet, that along with all the booby traps the Vietnamese laid down it's easy to see why Bickle flees the Senators rally at first sign of agents detecting him and his murderous intentions. 

A young prostitute gets into his cab one night, trying to flee from her pimp, but instead of driving off he waits for the pimp to catch up. The pimp makes the young girl get out of the car and hands Bickle a screwed up twenty dollar bill. This man is now marked and Bickle returns later in the film to take him out. Upon his executions he tries to find a bullet for himself but is unable to, he slumps on a couch waiting for the feds to show up and throw him in the slammer, but he is hailed as a hero. Like filme noir after the second world war, this neo noir uses the pessimism from the Vietnam war to accurately portray a disturbed veteran, the lust for fire power that our main character has only shows us that he is not only mentally unstable, but is mentally unstable and has four shooters. Iris is the femme fatale in this film, Bickle risks his life to save her, not out of sympathy or sexual desire; but just because it's what Bickle has trained to do. Wash the streets clean.