The greatest film about Moral Ambiguity

Rating: Null/10 (17 September 2000)

Is Travis Bickle a villain, an evil person, a bad' guy, wicked? Not really. He's a good person through and through who has been pushed beyond his limit and has gone insane. Now that he has gone insane and become a villain' or killer as far as the law's concerned--morally he's still in a state of limbo. How much killing three leeches will shade a basically decent person's grayness into the black is very questionable indeed. In fact, certain people might say that his grayness is still shaded towards the white. He's killed 3 people who most people wouldn't mind seeing get run over by a truck anyway. If you you were sitting on a jury, however, and you voted to let Travis off, you would be wrong. Just because someone's killed certain degenerates you don't much like doesn't make him any less of a killer and justice has to be served, even if there are extenuating circumstances.
So is it possible to call this guy a hero? Yes and No, but neither in any conventional sense; he's an absurd tragic hero' who's had to go insane to act out his heroism,' or he's an absurd tragic villain' driven to kill who is, in fact, the nicest of men! From one point of view, the whiter shade of his grayness is literally hanging by a thread, and from another, the blacker shade of his grayness is barely visible.
If he had killed the politician instead, his grayness would certainly shade enough into black for most people to consider him a villain, but then again, politicians aren't exactly that far above pimps now are they? People have used the term anti-hero' to denote this type of absurd hero,' but that's as meaningless as labeling him an anti-villain.' Take Don Corleone, or better yet, Michael Corleone, as an example. A lot of people consider a part of what Corleone does as a sort of heroism,' a twisted way of fighting the powers that be, the system.' Does this make him an absurd villain' or an anti-villain' or conversely maybe even an absurd hero' like Bickle? Both views are possible but the former can easily be seen to dominate. Corleone's a villain with his grayness shaded way out into the black but with enough sympathetic white elements to make him an extremely tragic figure and therefore interesting. What's special about Travis is what happens after the killings: the extreme difficulty we have of placing his grayness as either leaning towards the black or towards the white.