Brief Textual Analysis

De Niro's characters often depict a guilty victim of transgressive desires: excessive violence, so self-destructive that they are condemned. His characters are always mentally flawed individuals who are constrained by their past or heritage and desperate to improve the conditions of their existence whether it be financially in Goodfellas or socially in Taxi Driver. In Taxi Driver De Niro plays Travis Bickle a character fusion of the classic western hero and the psychopath/monster of the contemporary horror genre: it could be suggested that the comparison between these two distinct archetypes could be a hypothetical insight into how the western hero would behave if transplanted into the modern urban wilderness of the 70s.