Travis Bickle’s Terminal Imitation of Christ in Taxi Driver

The focus of this article is on the Christological frame we bring to a work of popular art, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. It thus addresses a general question of reception and interpretation: what do we draw upon, as viewers of a powerful film, in order to make sense of the spectacle of violence and corruption to which it exposes us? To what extent are these Christological presumptions of the viewer a correlative to the valencies of meaning which this work of art proposes to us?