The only time you can watch this movie and feel its effects is at like 1am.

Travis' mohawk haircut at the end of the movie also symbolises his time in Vietnam, When soldiers were about to go on 'Suicide missions' they would get the mohawk haircut.

What I wanna know is how the saxophone became so damned synonymous with lonliness in NYC.

The saddest part is how common Travis is now. With the rise of content consumption, hookup culture and porn loneliness is more common than ever for men

Rather be alone then surrounded by people that make a person feel lonely

Being a taxi driver is like being an observer where no one will acknowledge that you even exist and it makes you feel lonely seeing how happy and normal people's lives are when you're just struggling to be alive. Having driven Lyft, I can relate.

Travis was pretty smooth with Betsy until he took her to watch swedish erotica.

I feel like Taxi driver is a cautionary tale. Loneliness and not being able to relate to people can lead you down a path of self destruction. But it also says that you aren’t forced down this path. The reason Iris mirrors Betsy (I think) is that during the scene where Iris and Travis have lunch, they actually relate to each other for a moment, while with the earlier scene Travis didn’t relate to Betsy at all. And at the end, Travis is seen talking to the other taxi drivers, and it’s implied a tiny bit that he’s empathising to people a lot more. So maybe the ending is him letting the idea of Betsy (idealising people without understanding them) go.

Joker: "You're just like the rest of them."
Travis: "You don't know a thing about me pal."

The dangers of loneliness is what I learned most from this movie, watching this movie today, when I'm at a much more healthier point in my life, I see a lot of Travis in myself. How I would lash out internally when I got rejected by a woman, why I was so self destructive and suicidal. It makes sense because when you go from not really interacting with people all day to talking to some girl, who you think is gonna solve all your problems, you project your warped internal view of the world onto her and it just makes you look weird or crazy. I think men in general suffer from this the most, women aren't as susceptible to loneliness like men are because they don't have the ego that isolates them from other people. I think any man dealing with that self hatred or just general hatred of the world, needs to try to socialize more, drop his ego, go out there and make an active decision to know other real people and understand them. I make it sound much easier than it is, trust me, I know, but if you make an active decision and understand how important socializing is to your mental health, you'll save yourself from a lot of unhappiness.

Arthur: “what do you  get when you get a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash?!”
Travis: “you talkin to me?”

I like it when Travis says "let's get ready for some taxi drivin'"

The man Hasn’t slept in days. He gets headaches from the smell of flowers. He stares deeply into the bubbling of that cup thing. I could go on, but in my opinion, the whole movie is about Travis suffering from PTSD. Think about it, can’t sleep, wants to do something but doesn’t know what, constantly taking pills and feeling outcast and lonely like it’s him against the world. Everything in the city sets him off, like the violence and bad people on the street. And when Betsy rejects him, the only thing he knows to deal with this is to go back in action, hence the shaved head. If only travis got the help he needed, instead of living in a trash filled, dirty New York with only his thoughts

Taxi Driver is probably my favourite film of all time. I find it far scarier than any horror i’ve ever seen. It shows what loneliness and obscurity can drive some people to do.

Arthur Flecks' real dad.

I loved how you could see Travis slowly becoming crazy and having the loneliness drive him mad and to me the reason why he killed the pimps was obviously to save Iris but I also think it was to clean up New York just like he wanted to get rid of the “animals”

It's kind of amazing how much more relevant this film is today.

Step One: Make a damn good, fulfilling, very pro and absolutely fantastic video essay
Step Two: Enjoy your work
Step Three: Don't upload any kind of content for next two years and counting

Realizing that it wasn't a good thing to relate to Travis Bickle was a big part of growing up for me.

Taking this movie more at face value increases the impact for me - it's simply a man, with serious mental health issues, in a time where mental health was still incredibly taboo - a decade before the film was shot, it was still legal to institutionalize people. So now you've got a Vietnam Vet who not only feels isolated, he can't bring himself to communicate his loneliness. In parts, he's aware that there's something wrong to the way he's living and the way he feels, but as society continues to make him an outcast, Bickle ends up with two choices: It's either his problem, or the world's. And as so very many do, especially at the time, he chooses the latter.

Bickle ends up lauded for his efforts as many misinterpret his massacre as heroic, and it shows in the aftermath that Bickle is soothed... but it is only temporary. It is shot purposely to resemble the very beginning of the film - that you could just loop it.

A cruel cycle that is, at the very least, an unintended byproduct of such dense urban living.

It is both chillingly terrifying and melancholic.