The Heroic Journey In Taxi Driver

The shootout scene plays like a five-minute heroic journey, during which the hero loses his confidence after his first shot, then risks it all to save the victim. This format is meant to invest the audience in the protagonist’s future and to influence their expectations in a manner that incites joy when the protagonist fulfils them. As Decker et al. explain in their book, “it is the journey that is important. The possibility of [the antihero’s] transformation and reemergence as someone more than he once was, the ability to overcome” (Decker et al. xix). Decker et al. thus describe the antihero as a character who follows a typical hero’s journey, just through crude and violent means (Decker et al. xix). This then relates to Shafer and Raney’s study on antihero narratives where they found that viewers form story schemas, or “mental representations containing expectations about how a narrative is internally structured …show more content…
In Mortimer’s film analysis, for example, she describes how Taxi Driver invokes the style of the “classical Hollywood western” (Mortimer 29). This Hollywood western theme shows up several times before the final shootout, though it is most obvious when Travis practices drawing his guns in front of the mirror with his infamous line: “You talkin’ to me?” (Taxi Driver). Julian Rice directly references this scene’s similarity to the classic Hollywood western in his film analysis, describing how “when the audience sees Travis twirling a pistol in front of a mirror… they see their familiar escape fantasy of a heroic gunslinger practicing for a high-noon showdown” (Rice 112). The fact that Travis ends his time on the silver screen with a shootout continues this western strain while also placing him within a common heroic