Final notable film of pre Star Wars, cinematic era

Rating: 10/10 (21 September 2019)

Right let's get some context going, there are two pieces of history you should be aware of to understand the social conditions in New York and the greater US when considering this film. The first is the New York fiscal crisis, that came to a head in 1975 and continued through the late seventies. The second is the impact of the Vietnam war and particularly the My Lai massacre on the collective American psyche.
Both of those topics are too weighty and complex to do justice in something as trivial as a film review, so you're gonna hafta do the footwork yourself. And no, they didn't teach 'all that' at school because what you learnt there was the tripe they feed you so you grow in to a compliant citizen.
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This one of those films that's actually as deep and complex as it's often touted to be by those half wit film critics who're so easily bluffed by pseudy film makers. It's like this through a combination of circumstances, Scorsese delivers a narrative that is filtered through the audiences own imagination that is implicit rather than revealed through exposition. It works because of the rare commitment of De Niro and others, presenting a narrative open to interpretation.
That's not a particularly rare device in film making, Mike Leigh is does that a lot, the theory goes: you give the audience realistic but nebulously defined characters, if they're real enough we, the audience, can project on to those characters, by such means we're able to relate to them. But Scorsese's narrative is also stylised, he bookends the narrative, with the image of a mutilated hand conveyed by different characters who're the mirror image of each other, Tom and the Mafioso. Iris and Betsy they're the same but different, they're not victims but in places they don't want to be both seduced by someone unscrupulous, the pimp and the dissembling politician. We're forced to examine both ends of the social scale, the child abusing pimp and the indifference of the privileged ascendancy.
Travis is a character who it seems is persistently passing judgement on others, the junkies, the pimps etcetera but is that what's really happening? He buys his guns from Easy Andy and kills a thief without reflection He's a man in deep trouble, in need of help but he finds himself alone, isolated from any means of assistance. The weeks or months of insomnia are taking their toll, this sleeplessness is it something to do with Vietnam? And why have his workmates dubbed him Killer?
Hero or villain, it's all about perspective, kill a politician and you're a bad boy, do the same to a pimp and you're a hero. The fact that the politician probably did more to facilitate the evil inflicted by the pimp is lost in the narrative, now there's a social critique to ponder.
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Finally for some reason I find confusion often expressed about the language used by the interviewer when Travis applies for the job as a driver, ie: 'If you're gonna break my chops, you can take it on the arches. Understand?'. Let me explain, having your chops broken, is something an underling might experience when being admonished by a superior, the interviewer is being slightly ironic here as he transposes the roles. 'Take it on the arches' is a reference for the administration of corporal punishment during the intuition of slavery. Slaves would have their feet beaten with heavy sticks, so that they would continue to suffer pain as they tried to walk on their feet. The interviewer is literally telling Travis to, beat his feet.