Word: travises
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Unable to form connections with street people, Travis's attentions turn to Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a campaign worker for Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris). This, Scorsese implies, is the other, the dominant stratum of society. Betsy is confident, manipulative, and vapid--like the low-lifers, she registers no emotions, but unlike...
All of this passes Travis by. He has no organizing principle to his life. Experience floods him, but the distinctions blur. He can't understand why Betsy flees. To him it's just another betrayal, another failure, and his rage continues to mount. He prepares to assassinate Palantine.
Scorsese, on the other hand, does not rely solely on intellectual guesswork. Travis's emotional development is sketched vividly, convincingly. When he arrives in New York, his letters and diary are fairly banal, but as his experience begins to baffle him, the tone of his writings become progressively more psychotic...
BUT WHILE SCORSESE succeeds viscerally in convincing us of the authenticity of the psychosis, there is a gap. It is never fully explained why Travis's violence would focus on Palantine rather than, say, on Betsy. Scorsese reaches for something very big here, and he falls a little bit short...
The final moments of Taxi Driver constitute one of those endings too good too spoil. Intellectually it's a trifle slick, a sort of cinematic illustration of the old Rolling Stones lyric about "just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints..." But if Scorsese teases us...