Clapp,A . ""Are You Talking to Me?"" Visual Anthropology [0894-9468] 18.1 (2005). 1-18.

This article examines urban alienation, and the “overdeveloped, overcontrolled” city as the epicenter of social alienation. The author argues that New York has become the main cinematic setting for depicting urban alienation because of its intensity, diverse social world, sheer size, spatial structure, and its dominating skyline. Clapp asserts this belief started with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), in which a futuristic giant city was based on New York.
For almost all of human existence, people have had some knowledge of those with whom they had social contact and ties with. Clapp argues the city changed that condition, and, as cities became larger and more socially heterogeneous, the number of people who were strangers and alien to one another increased exponentially. To the author, Travis Bickle’s menacing demeanor in Taxi Driver has become the “face” for the culture of urban alienation and an abstraction of the anonymity, loneliness, social disengagement, and moral detachment for which the big city is regarded as the prime cause of.
Although the article does not specifically focus on Taxi Driver in particular, its perspective gives the audience a vehicle through which they could partially sympathize for Travis Bickle and better understand his character. From the sociological viewpoint of the author, Travis is likely emotionally damaged from his Vietnam experience and is lonely, bitter, and extremely alienated from society. When we first come across Travis on the screen or in the streets, he seems suspended somewhere between our pity and our revulsion. After reading this article, one can not help but think that maybe the daunting metropolis is to blame for Travis’ severe alienation from society and that he is just another lost and helpless lonely soul searching for an answer or a solution. For Clapp, Travis Bickle’s line “well, I’m the only one here”, which is his personal response in the mirror to the more famous line “Are you talking to me?”, sums up his alienation and estranged madness.