**[https://www.harrogatefilmsociety.org/event-details/taxi-driver](https://www.harrogatefilmsociety.org/event-details/all-we-imagine-as-light)** **Taxi Driver \| 1976 \| 18 \| Dir\. Martin Scorcese \| US \| IMDb 8\.2 \| English \| 114 mins** Taxi Driver (1976) is the members’ choice for HFS’s 71stseason. *Members are warned that the film features some extreme violence as well as child prostitution.* The film is set in mid-1970’s New York. It follows ex-marine and Vietnam war veteran, Travis Bickle, played by an early thirties Robert De Niro, whose performance as the increasingly disturbed Bickle earned him an Oscar nomination. Bickle takes a job as a night shift taxi driver, a role which is well suited to his insomnia, but which exposes him to the seedy side of New York life. Bickle is a loner, who has difficulty in forming relationships with women. He becomes infatuated with Betsy, a campaign worker for senator and presidential hopeful, Charles Palantine. He takes Betsy on a date to see a porn film, not having any appreciation of the inappropriateness of that nor of her likely reaction to it. Her subsequent rejection of him further accelerates Bickle’s sense of isolation, anger and mental deterioration Bickle’s response, like that of many subsequent alienated young men, is to prepare for violent retribution: he starts a program of intense physical conditioning, which includes shadow boxing and weapons drills. He also buys some handguns from a black-market gun dealer. The only questions are who Bickle will target and why. The final twenty minutes of the film answer that question. There is little logic or coherence in Bickle’s fragmented, irrational and often contradictory reasoning for his actions, much of which we learn through Bickle’s narration of a diary that he keeps. Having failed to hit his intended target, the focus of Bickle’s violence then becomes those associated with Iris, a 12-year-old child prostitute Bickle has befriended, played by 12-year-old Jodie

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