"Taxi Driver is an unacknowledged remake of perhaps the greatest of John Ford’s westerns, his late classic The Searchers. In both films, the hero tries to save a young woman who is perceived as a victim of brutal abuse. [...] The task is always to save the perceived victim. But what really drives this violence of the hero is a deep suspicion that the victim is not simply a victim. That the victim, effectively in a perverted way, enjoys or participates in what appears as her victimhood, so that, to put it very simply, she doesn’t want to be redeemed, she resists it."