Jason, Scott and all, This is a really good analysis, I appreciated it very much. This past year I attempted a project, I took every main character and a few minor ones and switched gender and started to rewrite Taxi Driver. I did this as an exercise/experiment during a long running writing workshop, (five years on and off) and neither my teacher or fellow writers could come up with a gender bended version of Travis' pornography use so central to his character. Which even more highlighted either gender differences or our prejudices about how the genders deal with despair. Would be interested in any ideas about this. Obsession with Romance novels/movies doesn't seem to have the same degree of pathos and a woman spending nights in porno theaters, even in the 70's, is not believable...

Interesting, Lois, and I think you're right. It just wouldn't be credible, especially as someone like Travis, who had normalized pornography so much that he didn't think twice about taking a woman on a date to a porno movie. Taxi Driver exploded out of the personal experiences of screenwriter Paul Schrader, a particularly dark period in his life, so in some ways perhaps it is so specific, it can only work in its actual form, as opposed to, say, Alien where they could switch Ripley's genre from male to female, and that could work - quite spectacularly as it turns out.