‘Taxi Driver’ screenwriter says Travis Bickle would be an incel today

Travis Bickle, the iconic protagonist of "Taxi Driver," would likely be an "incel" if the film were made today, according to screenwriter Paul Schrader.

Speaking on the 50th anniversary of the film's release, Schrader described the modern equivalent of Bickle as a lonely, resentful man who turns to violence after failing to connect with women.

Directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, the 1976 classic follows a mentally unstable Vietnam War veteran working as a night-shift cabbie in New York City. The character becomes increasingly obsessed with the crime and perceived moral decay surrounding him.

Schrader wrote the screenplay in just 10 days at the age of 26, using the process as a form of self-therapy. At the time, he was unemployed, recently divorced, and living out of his car.

The writer drew inspiration from his own profound isolation and the "underground man" archetype found in European existentialist literature.

Schrader also revealed that the studio mandated a significant change to the script to avoid potential civil unrest. The pimp character, eventually played by Harvey Keitel, was originally written as a Black man but was changed to a white man to prevent the risk of race riots.

Five decades after its release, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver endures not as a period piece of 1970s New York, but as a chillingly accurate prototype of modern male isolation and social resentment. Screenwriter Paul Schrader’s recent assessment—that Travis Bickle would today manifest as an "incel" (involuntary celibate)—is a profound diagnostic shift. It suggests that Bickle’s pathology has migrated from the physical trauma of post-war reintegration into the hyper-charged digital echo chambers of the 21st century, where misogyny and conspiracy theories find fertile ground in anonymous forums.

Bickle’s identity as a Vietnam veteran served as a critical lens for 1970s audiences to understand his psychological fracture. At the time, his character personified the broader American failure to provide adequate mental health support and social reintegration for returning servicemen. While the film avoids explicit partisan commentary, it masterfully captured a specific era of disillusionment, illustrating the systemic abandonment that followed the collapse of the post-war consensus.

Furthermore, Taxi Driver remains a prophetic critique of the toxic nexus between mass violence and the pursuit of notoriety. Schrader’s script, famously influenced by the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford, recognized early on that a media-saturated culture could inadvertently reward domestic terrorism with celebrity status. This logic has reached a dark zenith in the modern era, where the "contagion effect" of live-streamed shootings and attention-seeking violence has become a recurring security challenge. More than a cinematic landmark, Taxi Driver remains a stark sociological mirror, reflecting the persistent undercurrents of alienation that continue to drive radicalization in the contemporary landscape.

For the Vietnamese-American community, especially the older generation, the figure of Travis Bickle as a Vietnam veteran evokes a deeply complex set of emotions. From a cultural perspective, the film serves as a Hollywood record of the trauma and PTSD experienced by "the other side." It captures a specific American societal view of the war and its returning soldiers—a narrative that, while distinct, runs parallel to the memories held by the diaspora in Little Saigon. Even as families built new lives in the nail salon industry or arrived through F2B and EB-5 programs, this portrayal remains a poignant reflection of a shared history that continues to resonate over bowls of phở and within the collective memory of the community.