Portrayal of Vietnam War has become a popular theme in modern media due to the vast extent of people who are exposed to it. The effects of war on both the body and mind are clearly portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The audience is shown the negative outcomes of war; the chaos it brings to communities along with the mental decay of all involved. These are not your classic “Saving Private Ryan” films, where American troops come in and clean house. Rather these films portray the psychotic side of war, where some soldiers come back to society and can no longer function normally. Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now portray war as an ugly, disturbing event which affects both the soldiers and the people back home. Taxi Driver is set around the life of Vietnam Veteran, Travis Bickle. As …show more content…
After the war he researched links between the socio-economic class and combat. His results revealed that 80% of Harvard students obtained deferments, while 80% of working class men would be sent to the war. Fallows concluded one of his articles with "What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?", "We let the boys from Chelsea [a working-class area of Boston] be sent off to die" (The Washington Monthly, 1975). Taxi Driver shows the psychological effects the war through the main character, Travis. He is an isolated man, a man who has completely lost touch with society, trying to clean New York of its “filth”. He ends up with two options to cleanse the city: kill Charles Palantine, the candidate, or kill Sport, Iris’s pimp. The audience watches as Travis is surrounded by chaos attempting to create his specialized weapons to kill one of the men. In the end he does not kill the man running for Senator, but rather kills Sport, and Sports’ entourage. This ending makes Travis an idolized vigilante, instead of an crazed