Taxi Driver

What makes Travis such a compelling character is that he is more than just the enraged psychopath that we see towards the end of the film-he wants to do good (at least in his mind). We see this in his obsession with Iris, the 12-year-old prostitute who hopped in his cab one night trying to escape her pimp. Her pimp, Sport, takes her away from the cab and drops a crumpled $20 bill in the passenger seat of Travis' cab to forget the incident. Travis refuses to even touch the bill and associates it with the scum of the rest of the city. From this night, rescuing Iris becomes his goal because he wants to view himself as a hero. After his "real" one on one encounter with Iris, where he pretends to be interested as a client, when he is done lecturing her, he pays the man downstairs with the crumpled $20 that he had saved from Sport, to show how he considers the house and business to be filthy and low. His rescue attempt is an idea that Travis forces upon Iris because she seems to be content with her job and relationship with Sport; he becomes so determined to rescue her that he projects his hatred for the city onto Sport and his co-workers and kills them all in efforts to solve the problem. Why do you think Travis is so fixated on helping Iris?