Taxi driver compared to the searchers

First of all, when analyzing Travis Bickle and Ethan Edwards, you can see that they are both very similar. Both are war veterans from the defeated side, loners with a quest who have potential for violence and most importantly they are both alienated and “misunderstood by others” (Ben Famiglietti, 1995). This alienation and misunderstanding of characters by others is a general feature in the Western genre of the hero or anti-hero type in these cases. Also, both characters carry a profound hatred towards certain people that according to them are corrupting the American society. For Ethan it

“The whole conviction of my life now rest upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.” By Thomas Wolf, God’s lonely man

Finally, both films are a commentary of what was happening in the changing American society. John Ford’s The Searchers deals with issues of racism and the pressure to conform. Even though the 50’s were the Golden years, the years of plenty, only a segment of the population had achieve the American Dream, mostly WASP (white Anglo Saxon protestant), living the minorities in the margin of society. The characters in The Searchers are representative of different groups in the American society. Jorgensen is a foreign character that represents the immigrant who is disappointed that American dream is just an illusion. Scar is the minority who is continually degraded and discriminated against, in this case black Americans. Whereas Ethan is the old southerner that fears change and considers minority to be less than human. Martin is the “metes” that doesn’t care what color or culture you are, only family matters. Also in the 50’s there were high tensions between Whites and Blacks, much like Whites and Indians in The Searchers. It was also a time of movement rights and fights for racial desegregation with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Similarly in the 70’s it was a resurgence of movement rights in reaction to the Vietnam War. Also both films deal with a post-war era. M. Scorsese in Taxi Driver is concerned about political corruption, the inability of authority figures to control prostitutes and drug dealers and the disillusion of Vietnam War veteran about their society. The plotline was highly influenced by the social atmosphere of his time. It was a time where Americans didn’t know if they could rely on their politicians, especially after the Watergate incident under the Nixon administration, where society was declining and criminality increasing, especially in cities. Americans were disappointed by their government and felt that the American Dream was only a lie.

To conclude, Martin Scorsese’s film, Taxi Driver not only deliberately invoked the codes and conventions of the Western genre, but he also copied one of the most popular Westerns of all time, John Ford’s The Searchers. He does so by taking the same plotline, by having similar characters and themes. Also like John Ford’s movie, Taxi Driver was meant as a critic of the American society. Both Ethan and Travis,

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