A Narrator Who Cannot Be Trusted

Travis Bickle drives nights because he cannot sleep, keeps a diary in a voice that sounds like moral clarity and is actually a man losing the thread, and decides that the city needs cleaning. The film's method is to stay inside that head without endorsing it. Scorsese shoots New York through a windscreen in wet neon, holds on steam rising from grates, and cuts away from Travis at the exact moments when a normal film would explain him: there is a shot where the camera drifts off him during a phone call because his humiliation is not ours to watch. Bernard Herrmann delivered the score, saxophone over military snare, on the last day of his life. The final scene is deliberately ambiguous about whether anything has been resolved at all.