Taxi Driver Ending

Taxi Driver (1976), directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert Di Niro, is considered one of the all time greatest films. Its raw and and bleak description of New York soon after the end of the Vietnam War is chilling yet accurate. However, the ending to the movie is what caught me the most. At first glance, it seems like a pretty normal ending. Travis kills the gangsters and is an instant hero. But after further analysis, these theories about the end just being a dream come up. One theory points to the shot from a bird's eye view after Travis passes out to being his soul leaving him, and that all the fame and attention that comes after is just his imagination of what would happen. But, as much as this makes sense to me, I don't believe that's what Scorsese was trying to convey. The entire film rides on the background at the time, the violent, f-ed up, disgusting nature of New York in the 1970s. So why would Scorsese chose to leave the premise for what he based the entire film on in his ending? I believe that the ending to Taxi Driver was real, it actually did happen and Travis did survive. But there's more to it than just that. I think that Scorsese was attempting to continue to show how bad New York society was at the the time, so bad that the media glorifies someone like Travis, who the viewer knows is a murderer and a psychopath. To me, the ending was a kind of parting shot from Scorsese, trying to show the viewer that, to put it bluntly, Travis' killings of the gangsters didn't really do much to improve society in any way, and it's still as violent and as messed up as it was before. From my viewpoint, its a depressing end to a pretty depressing movie, with Scorsese basically saying that Travis' idea of a heroic act did nothing for society, and the killings, prostitution, and drugs will keep on flowing through New York.