Travis Bickle or Rupert Pupkin : Which DeNiro Character is Really a Villain?

When the American Film Institute released a list of the 100 greatest American movies ever made in 1998, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver came in at number 47, sandwiched in between A Clockwork Orange and Jaws. The 100 finalists had been narrowed down from a list of 400 nominees. Missing from this list of 400, as well as from the list of 100, was another Martin Scorsese film, The King of Comedy. Taxi Driver enjoyed almost universal acclaim from the moment it was released. Even the temporary pall cast over the film after John Hinckley claimed it inspired him to shoot Pres. Ronald Reagan did nothing to limit the film's steady claim to being a classic.

On the other hand, The King of Comedy was almost universally ignored by critics and audiences when first released; many critics complained that it was nothing more than a pale imitation of Taxi Driver that followed the same general plot line of a psychotic individual achieving a level of fame after committing a violent act. It is the fact that Travis Bickle winds up as the hero at the end of Taxi Driver that has driven much of the acclaim for that movie. It has been held up as a shining example of the rise of the antihero in the films of the 1970s. In fact, the latter film stands as a much more complex example of antiheroism in film because Travis Bickle's standing as an antihero must be held up to question; Bickle is actually a simple hero in comparison to his counterpart Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. Yet both characters are last seen in the guise of socially accepted hero.