ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that captivity plots, a frontier setting, and cultural conflict have been employed in films other than Westerns; these films, too function as captivity narratives, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver interprets the captivity narrative from a postmodern perspective to interrogate the narrative process of constructing the hero. The captivity narrative has remained influential in American popular culture through a variety of post-war American films. The Searchers, considered a masterwork of the American cinema, is a revisionist captivity narrative, primarily because the captive resists being rescued. The captivity narrative has endured for over three hundred years in literature and film because its plot, central characters, and attendant themes provide a mythically resonant formula through which to address issues of race, gender, cultural identity, violence, and heroism. The captivity paradigm offers an apparently amenable form through which to address increasing American anxiety over the rise of the Third World.
