ABSTRACT
Martin Scorsese's landmark film Taxi Driver is a major work in the captivity narrative tradition. Taxi Driver shows that the captivity premise derives more from the realm of fantasy than from the realm of experience; this narrative tradition derives from a subject in search of a self-aggrandizing, indeed, self-creating, story to enact. Taxi Driver suggests that identity can only be synthetic, an amalgam of cultural representations, slogans, cliches. Taxi Driver's politics are a feature and an effect of its postmodern sensibility. The film destroys the assumptions on which the captivity narrative operates and reveals the hero to be a textual identity constructed by the plot. The film accomplishes more, however, than rejecting the captivity narrative tradition, for it poignantly attests to the political bind of postmodern culture: a desire for a purpose that could make human agency meaningful again along with a pervasive doubt that such a purpose could exist.
