The Lenore Thomson Exegesis Wiki
The 1976 film directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Robert de Niro, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Albert Brooks.
Roger Ebert's review of Taxi Driver.
This is a movie about inferior extraversion.
The movie could almost be summarized in Lenorean terms: Travis Bickle lives in so completely introverted a world, he's lost all extraverted connection despite living in a bustling city. He ultimately draws attention to himself and creates a place for himself in the world by acting out instinctive dramas of combat and rescue that have almost nothing to do with the reality of his situation.
Travis Bickle is the lead character, played by Robert de Niro.
Travis displays the amazing self-discipline and completely self-initiated motivation and vision typical of INTJs. Gripped by his visions of cleaning up the city and assassinating a politician, he runs his life in truly goal-directed, "executive judgement" Te style, getting his body into excellent shape, mastering weapons, carrying out plans and executing them with never a moment of self-doubt.
When he takes up guns, with all that Te follow-through, his rehearsals would seem to show inferior Se. He doesn't particularly want respect. He wants people's blood to chill with fear when he surprises them and makes his impact. He wants power--the power to respond instantly, crushingly, surprisingly, with overwhelming force.
The sign in his apartment, and his conversation with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), about "One of these days I'm going to get organiz-iz-ed" might even be a hint of Te as showing the kind of path that would bring his energy and discipline to something more constructive and more harmonious with the community around him.
He is surrounded by the dominant-Se world of prostitutes, crime, shows, lights, everything in the city trying to grab his attention.
Lenore would seem to make him an ITP, and his famous "Are you talking to me?" rehearsal in the mirror an illustration of inferior Fe--reacting to perceived disrespect.
There are INTP gun nuts who think the world is being ruined by scum and filth and therefore requires some draconian changes, but a big difference between them and Travis Bickle is the complexity of their reasoning. The NTP gun nuts have complicated reasoning, based on all sorts of authorities, observations, precedents, facts, and so on, that "show" that people are justified in acting outside the law--because they are acting in accord with a higher law, one that is just as rigorous.
Travis Bickle doesn't really have any reasoning for anything he does or thinks. He directly perceives that the city is filled with scummy people, and that's all there is to it. He directly perceives that his whole life had been aimed directly at assassinating Jack Palantine, and that's all there is to it. This would seem to be the way of Ni: one's ideas are experienced as direct perception, not needing reasoning and not needing comfirmation from other people or connection with other people's ideas. What is "perceived" in this manner, though, is not directly observable things like shapes, colors, people, but something felt as penetrating beyond appearances--the true, underlying reality, the deeper meaning of what is going on.
Travis's mind only begins to acquire order and coherence when he seeks defined goals: his job as a taxi driver where he works "long hours" and focuses on the bottom line, his pursuit of mastery of guns, and his attempts to assassinate and rescue. All this would suggest secondary Te.
Also in contrast with NTPs, Travis does nothing tentatively. When he has a goal, he acts to achieve it, straight as an arrow. He does not play around. NTPs play around relentlessly, it being felt that play will yield unexpected insights and that a priori reasoning or goal-direction is inherently too narrow and uninformed a way to get yourself connected with the world.
The movie could perhaps be summarized as "Travis lives in an inarticulate, uninformed world of introverted perception, is pained by his loneliness and lack of connection to others, doesn't really understand it, senses dimly that Te is a way forward, but mostly spends his time on Se ways to get noticed and make an impact--which are a disaster." We don't really see Ni in any clear way, Bickle is so introverted. We can only guess dominant Ni because inferior Se is so much in evidence.
Against this hypothesis
Bickle is remarkably uncurious. He doesn't know or care anything about politics, and he ruins his date with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) because he's never learned anything about movies. You'd think an N would have the kind of wide-ranging curiosity to have learned about these things by age 26.
Where's Fi? In an off-balance INTJ who is neglecting an extraverted perspective, you would expect not a concern with fixing the world, but with keeping one's own soul pure--especially, by acts involving refraining from involvement in the outer world in ways designed to justify belief in one's goodness or superiority (e.g. refraining from eating animals, refraining from killing people).
See the ISTP hypothesis below. There, you don't need to infer the dominant function indirectly because of inferior behavior, the dominant function is continually in evidence in his willingness to break the law to serve a higher law.
Against against this hypothesis
Perhaps tertiary Fi shows up in Bickle's view that the badness of people's surroundings stems from the innate weakness or rottenness of their souls. And what about his attempts at charity, going into the bad sections of town, as Lenore describes ISFPs, trying to rescue the few people that he perceives as good? The Jodie Foster character did nothing to deserve to be rescued; rather, Bickle thought that she deserved to be rescued only because of what she was.
Consonant with Bickle's lack of wide-ranging curiosity (suggesting S) is the fact that he takes on a "rescuer" role, acting out a primitive self-concept as the hero rescuing the girl from captors. He's oblivious to the fact that both the women he tries to rescue are pretty happy where they are.
Against this hypothesis
Bickle does not lament details being out of place. He doesn't care much at all about whether specific details are "right" or not. Concern that details be "right", regardless of how they relate to your personal business, simply because details matter for their own sake and you think a huge amount depends on them, would be such a hallmark of Si that it's hard to type guess someone ISJ if they don't have that trait.
Another take on Travis's inferior extraversion is the one Roger Ebert gives: that Bickle is essentially lonely and longs to make a connection with people. This is consonant with Lenore's take that the "You talkin' to me?" scene is inferior Fe.
Seeing himself as providing law and order to a world that has none would be very consonant with dominant Ti. In his mind, he is at work on justice, seeing to it that people get what's rightfully coming to them, the good people getting rescued and the bad people getting killed. His sense of justice does not relate to man-made laws (Te), but to something experienced as transcending culture, an inner attunement to how things ought to be. That view of justice might be the classic illustration of Lenore's conception of Ti, especially as it creates the self-image of ISTPs.
The same observations about an Ni self-experience of "direct perception" (i.e. no reasoning for his wild beliefs) would work here as tertiary Ni.
Against this hypothesis
When he drives around watching the people of the city, he isn't thinking inferior-Fe thoughts like, "Look at those people, all affectionate and loving with each other, isn't that disgusting?" or "Look at those people, they've all got somebody who cares for them, but no one cares for me, the unappreciative bastids!" It's more like, "Look at those people and the viscerally disgusting reaction they produce! Inferior beings! Let the rain wash them away!"
He practices his weapons mostly for pride and to make himself a dangerous force on Earth, not for the joy of play. He doesn't seem to love his weapons for the sake of the artistic or aesthetic rightness of them.
When the pimp (Harvey Keitel, "Sport") tries to joke with Bickle, Bickle is stiff and doesn't even seem to get the jokes. Bickle is stunningly literal-minded, even as he thinks of himself as possessing deep insight, just like a certain "wooden" sort of INTJ.
Bickle dresses like a "square". So square that the pimp thinks he's a cop when they first meet. Bickle has no sense of shock value, entertainingness, grand gestures, or the joy of drawing attention to oneself for fun. Hardly an SP mentality.
How would Se help this guy?
Against Introverted Thinking (for extroverted sensation): Jung: The extroverted thinking function devolves (somewhat) to est ergo est. The introverted thinking function devolves to cogito ergo cogito. For the most part, certain types are assigned to TiS because people don't recognize the real non-N subtype(s) of introverted thinking. Se tends to destroy that which they find hypocritical (or that which threatens them, or that which is denied them). A significant amount of descriptions of TiS deal with the less social variants of Se or Ne (Bruce Lee - Ne).
TiS/F goes to problem solving. Think Stephen Hawking (maybe???), Isaac Asimov, Bobby Fisher, Dilbert.
Gun nuts are almost always a counterphobic Fi/6 variant (or related). Focused way too much on the attitudes and possible attitudes of the people around them than internal arrangement of non-people oriented ideas (problem-solution/systematic-pattern apperception - these aren't fully mutually exclusive -- people may be an ancillary phenomena in these ideas, but they aren't primary (except in psychology/sociology, obviously)).
The intuitive subtype of Ti will write books like "Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World", Roger Zelazny.
Tis so seriously dislike being interrupted that it is very rare we'd attempt to draw notice except with our ideas (the kind as stated above).
Caveat: I haven't seen the movie, but am reasoning on various things I've read.
Retracted some things, what's left I'm as certain as I possibly can be about it.
See also Inferior Function.