"Travis gave punks a hair of aggression."  The Toronto Star 12 Feb. 2005: H02

    This article discusses one of Taxi Driver’s momentous scenes: the unveiling of Travis Bickle’s famous Mohawk. According to the director Martin Scorsese, the camera was to track rightward through a crowd of people attending a political rally. After observing a few anonymous midriffs, the camera was to stop at what, at this point in Taxi Driver, would be a familiar figure: the army jacket-wearing cab driver Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, viewed only from chest to thigh, his hands pouring pills into his palm. As Travis lifts the tablets to his mouth, the camera was to follow the hand upward to reveal the character's face. For the first time in the movie, we’d be seeing the Mohawk. The camera work had to be executed with perfection because the appearance of the Mohawk symbolized Travis’ moment of truth. This was when the audience was to realize that Travis had crossed the point of no return into insanity. Bickle’s Mohawk signified a special situation and that he was ready to get to the work of purification.
Bickle’s Mohawk had a huge impact on culture in America as it became a symbol of punk aggression influencing art, music, and the whole post-Vietnam war “punk” movement. The Mohawk was seen everywhere from Joe Strummer of The Clash to Mr. T when he entered the ring to fight Rocky Balboa.
    The article also talks about the inspiration for Travis Bickle’s character, which the screenwriter, Paul Schrader, primarily based on two sources. The first one being Arthur Bremer, a paranoid schizophrenic who took a crippling shot at presidential candidate George Wallace. The second source of inspiration for Travis Bickle was Schrader himself. Right before writing the script, Schrader was in a lonely and alienated position much like the character he based upon himself was. Schrader lost his girlfriend and the apartment he was sleeping in, and he spent a few weeks living alone, desperate, depressed, and drunk in his car. Schrader made Travis a Vietnam veteran because the national trauma of the war seemed to blend perfectly with Bickle’s paranoid psychosis.
    This article is important and relevant to Taxi Driver because it gives one a sense of where a unique character such as Travis Bickle can be conjured up from and where the inspiration for his personality came from.
 

Dempsey, Michael. "Taxi Driver Review" Film Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 4, (1976 ), pp. 37-41

Michael Dempsey’s article provides a critical review of Taxi Driver. The film’s major characters and scenes are highlighted and discussed thoroughly. Certain plot line improbabilities are reviewed to point out some of the film’s shortcomings. For example, Dempsey questions Travis’ naivety in taking Betsy to see a hard-core porno movie on their second date. Travis’ gaffe is difficult to accept as he claims not to have known that any other kind of movie exists or that pornography would upset the woman he has cast as his “angel.” Who can believe that a cabdriver, witnessing and hearing every variety of human kinkiness, spending hours himself in scummy porn theaters, would be this naP?ve? Dempsey asserts that Scorsese and Schrader have both gone on record saying that Travis’ blunder with Betsy is an unconscious act of self-destruction and proof of how isolated from human life Travis has become. Dempsey argues that Scorsese and Schrader purposely eliminated Taxi Driver’s lead female character because they preferred the certainty of blood and a more commercial “shoot-em up” climatic ending to the chance of love.

Interestingly, Dempsey interprets the film in a religious context, citing the repressive Protestant fundamentalism of Schrader’s youth and its effect on the script. He compares Travis to a mythic icon or secular saint, a lowlife Christ that has come to “cleanse the temple of moneylenders.” When a dealer lays out his inventory of guns for Travis, painstakingly cataloguing the power and caliber of each, Dempsey argues the scene is intentionally sacramental with Travis and the dealer handling the weapons like chalices. When Travis prepares for violence with exercising, dieting, fast-draw target practice before a mirror, and a Mohawk haircut, Dempsey asserts that these ritual preparations of the body looks like a priest vesting for Mass. The author also discusses how the ending conforms to some Hollywood cliches, such as the revenge ending, which provides a purely physical jolt and obtains nothing more than a reflex-reaction.

Ultimately, this article breaks down Taxi Driver’s minor plot impossibilities and how religious connotations tie into the understanding of the film.

Swensen, Andrew J. "THE ANGUISH OF GOD'S LONELY MEN: DOSTOEVSKY'S UNDERGROUND MAN AND SCORSESE'S TRAVIS BICKLE" Renascence; Summer2001, Vol. 53 Issue 4, p267, 20p

In this article, Swensen examines the relationship between Scorsese’s Travis Bickle and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Swensen points out that both works depict a persona which is alternatively a variation, a corruption, and an inversion of the idea of the hero; transforming the hero into a concept of the “antihero”. Swensen argues that both Scorsese and Dostoevsky construct a narrative of the isolated and anonymous individual amidst a dense labyrinthine city with its frenzied temptation and vice. The overcrowding, exploitation, greed, and scum of society create a social norm of cynical indifference morally corrupting the substance of the individual, as evident in Travis Bickle.

Swensen compares Dostoevsky’s Underground Man to Scorsese’s Travis Bickle, both protagonists of their novels, as they see a decaying metropolitan society as a “hell on earth”. Similar to how Dostoevsky places the frame of a third-person “editor” around the hero’s text, Swensen argues that Scorsese uses diegetic and extra-diegetic camera perspectives to mimic Travis’ eyes and vision. Swensen gives us a more immediate connection between the two in the fact that Scorsese approached Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver’s screenwriter) with the intention of adapting Dostoevsky’s Note from Underground into a film. Swensen also talks about how Taxi Driver reflects the influence of French Existentialism, and the mise-en-scene, lighting, and setting, particularly in the murk and darkness of the film, owe a debt to film noir.

In Swensen’s view, the front seat of Travis’ taxi and his dilapidated apartment become the epicenter and the locus of isolation for Travis. These settings become the “underground” and stand opposed to the space of society, the alien and hostile “aboveground”. Swensen calls attention to Scorsese’s depiction of Travis’ apartment, which parallels the developing insanity of a character like Travis Bickle. His minimally furnished but cluttered apartment reflects Travis’ mental disruption. From a camera pan across the apartment, we see cracked paint, scattered books, a dangling and bare light bulb, a small table covered with pill bottles, a metal cot, and numerous posters from slow Palantine’s political campaign. This imagery renders an unsettling glimpse of the anti-social, alienated, and maniacal anxiety emerging from within Travis, which surfaces in the climatic ending.