The Taxi Driver - Martin Scorsese
This is the film that follows an honourably dicharged US Marine, Travis Bikle, a man who lives in New York after spending time in the Vietnam War. Travis suffers from insomnia and works the nights as a taxi driver around New York, spending his time thinking about how the world, in particular New York, has become a discugusting corrupt place filled with equally discugusting and corrupt people.
In amoung all this foulness he see's there is one and only one good thing he discovers, a woman by the name of Betsy, a worker for the presidential nomination campaign of Senator Charles Palantine. Some of the many themes used in this film are conflicted feelings about fate, loneliness, violence and more importantly, discovery.
The first of these themes can be seen when Travis has his own conflictions about who controls his fate, in this case it is either him or God, discovery can be linked to this when he discovers after various events that he can't be the one who controls his fate that it must be God. This is atleast what he believes, but due to more various events he now doubts his idea of destiny and fate, then in a single situation he takes control of himself and finally discovers the real truth behind his fate, that he is one that controls it, not God.
This idea is played throughout the movie, with Travis constantly being unsure of himself and this is shown by the very dramatic change he goes through, from being a sort of average kind of man to being an almost complete psychopath. Travis however does discover in the end the who really is in control and that plays a huge role in the story.
TRAVIS: "Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man."
TRAVIS: "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Well, who the hell else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well, I'm the only one here. Who the f**k do you think you're talkin' to?"
By far the most famous quotes of this entire film, this is the renowned scene where Travis is talking to himself in the mirror with a pistol hidden up his sleeve. In this scene Travis tries to become more intimidating by treatening the imaginary person infront of him by drawing his gun as quickly as he can. The theme of loneliness is extreamly prominent in this particular scene as Travis is so alone, he is forced to speak with his own reflection and in his mind, the reflection is always threatening him.
The discovery here is that Travis finds he wants be a sort of vigilante, that this is his calling, although he tends to seek out the bad things in life even if they aren't actually there. Another and the more important discovery however is when he goes to see Betsy after she has purposely avoided contact with him and he begins to talk to her in the same way that he does to himself in the mirror. He finds that in real life, things don't go the same way as he pictured they would in his mirror, he finds that he does not posses the same power as he does in that world and it shows when he attempts to speak with the one good thing in his life.
Probably one of the most important and obvious aspects of discovery in this film is self-discovery, this is one of the key factors that changes Travis to the man he is towards the end of the film. The self-discovery of his fate and destiny, his loneliness and all his suroundings, they are what turn him into a gun wielding psycho, bent on basically cleansing the cesspool that he lives in. Travis Bickle is a prime example of how discoveries can change a persons beliefs, ideas and the person themself.
