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Mar. 10th, 2021 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynA friend of mine periodically checks to see what's leaving Netflix in the next few weeks, and recently saw that Taxi Driver will be going away at the end of the month. I figured, well, it's supposed to be a seminal cinematic work, right? Might as well watch it just to say that I did. I knew maybe two things about the movie before starting. One, the 'you talkin' to me?' scene with the mirror, and two, it's the movie that supposedly convinced John Hinckley Jr. that the best way to impress Jodie Foster would be to shoot President Reagan.
I'm about half an hour into it thus far and frankly Travis Bickle does not feel like a person; there is something terribly missing there and I cannot get a sense of anything existing about this character before the beginning of the movie. Whatever may have caused him to be who or what he is, I don't know, but I don't feel the presence of an actual person there. I don't feel the potential of backstory there. There is nothing at all to work from, no sense of some prior background or history or existence that could be used to fanfic a history for him... he might just as well have been dropped onto the streets of 1976 New York City and had that be his first moment of existence.
I don't give a damn about him. Except in the sense that he is a sterling example of the kind of New York City person that you avoid making eye contact with, ever, and that you avoid doing anything noteworthy around because it might draw their attention, and that you have to gray rock at if they start talking to you, because trying to shut down the conversation will only make them more likely to try to get you to talk more so it's best to be so uninteresting that they decide to bother someone else.
He is very definitely the kind of person that women need to avoid, though. He's the kind of person that make it hard for all the other men in the world, because women don't know if they're dealing with a good guy or with Travis Bickle and don't want to take that chance. His reaction to Cybil Shepard's character walking out on their date when he took her to a porn movie because he didn't understand that that's not what you do rang more bells for me about his character than all the rest of the movie prior to that five minutes. Unfortunately, the bells being rung were all reminders of the 2014 Isla Vista killings. In that five minutes of "I THOUGHT YOU WERE WONDERFUL BUT YOU'RE A WHORE LIKE THE REST OF THEM", the phone call, the slew of rejected flowers? I realized I was looking at Elliot Rodger. At best. That was some incredible incel stuff right there, especially given his comments earlier in the movie about cleaning up the city and filth and so on and so forth.
This does not make me any more interested in him. This just means I recognize an element of the character. And I neither like it nor care about him. There is not enough there to this character to make me want to see his fall or his snapping or his breaking. There is no indication so far that he has any kind of redeeming quality at all that would make the rest of what I've seen tragic in any way. There is only the overwhelming sense that if I found myself on a subway car with him, I would be best off getting off the train and taking a different one, and keeping an eye out the next few days to make sure I didn't have to change my commute route to avoid him.
He isn't a character. He's just someone you don't want to be stuck in an elevator with.
I'm about half an hour into it thus far and frankly Travis Bickle does not feel like a person; there is something terribly missing there and I cannot get a sense of anything existing about this character before the beginning of the movie. Whatever may have caused him to be who or what he is, I don't know, but I don't feel the presence of an actual person there. I don't feel the potential of backstory there. There is nothing at all to work from, no sense of some prior background or history or existence that could be used to fanfic a history for him... he might just as well have been dropped onto the streets of 1976 New York City and had that be his first moment of existence.
I don't give a damn about him. Except in the sense that he is a sterling example of the kind of New York City person that you avoid making eye contact with, ever, and that you avoid doing anything noteworthy around because it might draw their attention, and that you have to gray rock at if they start talking to you, because trying to shut down the conversation will only make them more likely to try to get you to talk more so it's best to be so uninteresting that they decide to bother someone else.
He is very definitely the kind of person that women need to avoid, though. He's the kind of person that make it hard for all the other men in the world, because women don't know if they're dealing with a good guy or with Travis Bickle and don't want to take that chance. His reaction to Cybil Shepard's character walking out on their date when he took her to a porn movie because he didn't understand that that's not what you do rang more bells for me about his character than all the rest of the movie prior to that five minutes. Unfortunately, the bells being rung were all reminders of the 2014 Isla Vista killings. In that five minutes of "I THOUGHT YOU WERE WONDERFUL BUT YOU'RE A WHORE LIKE THE REST OF THEM", the phone call, the slew of rejected flowers? I realized I was looking at Elliot Rodger. At best. That was some incredible incel stuff right there, especially given his comments earlier in the movie about cleaning up the city and filth and so on and so forth.
This does not make me any more interested in him. This just means I recognize an element of the character. And I neither like it nor care about him. There is not enough there to this character to make me want to see his fall or his snapping or his breaking. There is no indication so far that he has any kind of redeeming quality at all that would make the rest of what I've seen tragic in any way. There is only the overwhelming sense that if I found myself on a subway car with him, I would be best off getting off the train and taking a different one, and keeping an eye out the next few days to make sure I didn't have to change my commute route to avoid him.
He isn't a character. He's just someone you don't want to be stuck in an elevator with.
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Date: 2021-03-10 05:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-10 05:28 pm (UTC)no idea how people other than Hinckley feel or are supposed to feel about the guy.
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Date: 2021-03-10 11:26 pm (UTC)https://movies.substack.com/
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Date: 2021-03-12 02:18 pm (UTC)