The returning veteran, 1976

The datum

Bickle's military service is the first concrete fact the film gives us about him — offered in the cab-depot interview, then never returned to. After that the war is carried entirely by objects and symptoms.

Taxi Driver inscribes Vietnam indirectly, as in the application scene, throughout the film. It is written on the character's body, as revealed in the workout scene by the long, three-inch wide shrapnel scar along the left side of his back. It is foregrounded in the costuming, as Bickle wears one of two "King Kong Company" military jackets in almost every scene outside his apartment. The costuming communicates his military service to each person he encounters, as if the character's repressed history returns through his dress.

— Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese, smc 394

That is a precise observation about Mise en scène doing the work of exposition: the jacket tells everyone in the film what Travis never says, and he changes into a longer dark green one for the assassination attempts.

The dispute

The screenwriter says the war is not the subject; the director says it is the engine. See Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending for both quotations. Scorsese's version:

It was crucial to Travis Bickle's character that he had experienced life and death around him every second he was in south-east Asia. That way it becomes more heightened when he comes back; the image of the street at night reflected in the dirty gutter becomes more threatening.

— Scorsese on Scorsese (1989), sos 62

The Companion notes that most critics acknowledge Bickle is a veteran and almost none make anything of it — it lists sixteen of them (smc 393).

The scholarly reading

Michael High's chapter reconciles the two standing positions — that Travis is pathological, or that he is an ordinary product of a sick society — by reading him through trauma theory: "an interplay of external stimuli and internal frailty" (smc 11, smc 386). On this account the film is not an allegory but an early attempt to represent what being both victim and perpetrator of violence does to a person.

Amy Taubin's framing is the one to keep for Values:

its success, as Amy Taubin (2000) notes in her book on the film, stems from failure: the defeat of the United States in Vietnam, the collapse of the countercultural movement, and the breakdown of hegemonic masculinity structure not only the historical moment within the film, but also the trials of the character.

— Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese, smc 392

Cynthia Fuchs reads the film as Vietnam crossed with film noir, arguing the "correlation between the war and this essentially American style underlines the cultural mechanisms that made Vietnam possible, unwinnable, and even inevitable" (smc 396).

Why it belongs on the bench

Because it is a clean case of context that is entirely inferential. There is no flashback, no combat footage, no speech about the war. A student can be shown how to build a historical reading out of a jacket, a scar, an insomnia and a date — and then shown that the film's own screenwriter would reject the reading. That is a better lesson than either position alone.

Films noted here that this context touches: Taxi Driver (1976).