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Martin Scorsese may well be the greatest living filmmaker. If not, he at least ranks in the top tier of greatest directors of all time. Even when working with the fairly standard biopic genre material of The Aviator, or doing remakes like Cape Fear, he always creates a film that is simply fascinating to behold. When it comes to Taxi Driver, you could watch it on mute and still be intrigued, or with the sound up and your eyes closed, and the movie would remain enchanting.

There aren’t many directors so capable at effortlessly building a world around you. You’ll feel as if you’re really sitting in that grimy taxi cab, right next to Travis Bickle. It almost has a documentary like feel with the gritty look of the film and the spontaneous nature of the script. It is as close as you can get to the “found footage” feel without gimmicks like hand held cameras.

You could consider the film the second part of a trilogy with Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, and John Ford’s The Searchers, which both of the other films are loose remakes of. All three of these films tell a very similar story, and it goes to show that a movie not so much about what it’s about, but how it is about it.

The Searchers is an adventure film rotating around the themes of racism and lonesomeness. Paris, Texas takes a similar story and tells it in a sweet way, focusing on issues of lonesomeness and family, and Scorsese focuses on lonesomeness and the use of violence as a means of personal validation. In all three, the heroes serve as escorts, attempting to rescue people and put them where they need to be, reuniting them with their families, but in all three, the heroes must leave once more in the end, forever alone.

Each film is a statement on loneliness, and this is why these characters are so easy to sympathize with. All three characters commit, or have committed, deeds that normal human beings would not take pride in, but you find yourself wanting them all to come out okay, even Travis Bickle, who is half hero and half sociopath, because we all know what it feels like to be so alone.

Everyone, sooner or later, feels that intense, terrible loneliness. That feeling that, even though you’re surrounded by other people, you’re trapped in a little bubble and incapable of breaking out and truly connecting with anyone. This is where Travis is stuck in his life, and we know that that can drive a person crazy.

What few people want to discuss, because it involves delving into your own dark side, is the part of us all that roots for Travis in the end of the film. What he does cannot be morally justified, but he does find the validation he was seeking. The tragedy is that morality isn’t as simple as Travis makes it out to be.

The film serves as a great companion piece to The Searchers and Paris, Texas, but it also goes hand in hand with Stallone’s First Blood, which was similarly about an outsider, a Vietnam veteran, who turns to violence as a way to find personal validation.

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