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Mar. 11th, 2021 08:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynFinished Taxi Driver last night.
For a brief few minutes after I resumed watching- I was more like 40-45 minutes in rather than half an hour, if someone else is concerned about plot points- Travis developed something of a personality. He went from a vague "I wanna ... I wanna do something" conversation with Peter Boyle to buying a bunch of guns from a guy in a hotel room, and the montage of him learning to modify them and practicing with them showed him as finally being interested in something, even if it was just being a gun nut.
I am not calling real world people who are super into the modification and range use of guns 'gun nuts'. Travis's montage gave the impression of obsession.
Then it started going downhill again and he got all obsessed with the political candidate that Cybill Shepard worked for. And I don't know if Scorsese planned it that way, but it felt like a case of 'the bitch who turned me down has an interest in another man, I will punish her for that interest by killing him'. The Jodie Foster bits... did not help either. Maybe he was supposed to be suddenly caring and empathetic towards her, I don't know; what I saw was a guy who decided that he was going to Save The Prostitute Whatever The Cost, and who attempted multiple conversations with her without actually talking to her. I mean, she was there and he addressed his remarks to her, but it felt like he was having a conversation with his mental image of a Sweet Virginal Helpless Twelve Year Old Girl Trapped By Horrible Men In A Horrible Life Completely Against Her Sweet Virginal Will and meanwhile here's Jodie Foster on the couch next to him or across the table from him going "you're weird, I'm not doing as well as I'd like but you don't understand me so come on, chill out".
White-knighting the sweet virginal helpless twelve year old blonde white girl, you understand. I couldn't help but wonder exactly how worked up he'd get if the twelve year old prostitute character were Puerto Rican or African-American. Given that the first person he shot in the movie was a black teenager robbing a local bodega, and that he didn't so much as blink or bat an eye, and given the casual racism of other characters around him, my guess is not at all.
Anyway, it just felt like Elliot Rodger, The Movie, except without the delusions of grandeur that the Isla Vista killer was prone to. And to be fair, the impression that I have is that Rodger was significantly smarter than Travis Bickle. But it felt like an incel who didn't have access to the internet to express his isolation and inability to interact with other humans in a reasonable way, and when he went bugnuts on Jodie Foster's pimp, Jodie Foster's pimp's assistant, and a random criminal type who showed up during the shooting, I was actively rooting for Jodie Foster's pimp because at least he was interesting- skin-crawlingly sleazy, but there was more to him than there was to Travis. (Nothing against Robert DeNiro. His performance was great. The character as written? Was not great.)
And then the last five minutes.
The only way the last five minutes of this movie make any fucking sense is if everything after Bickle makes a finger-gun gesture at his own head represents his dying dreams of glory. Travis makes the aforementioned gun suicide gesture and passes out. The NYPD comes into the room where he's bleeding out from a bullet wound that grazed his neck, and where the pimp and pimp assistant are dead and Jodie Foster is screaming in the corner; there's a dead guy in the hallway. Camera pulls back to show reporters in the street. Fade to images of newspaper clippings on an apartment wall calling the young taxi driver a hero for killing these guys and saving a twelve year old girl from their clutches. Voiceover of a man reading a letter from Jodie Foster's parents thanking him for saving their daughter and returning her to them, a letter written while Travis is in a coma. Camera pans over newspaper article showing two seriously older-looking people who are supposedly Jodie Foster's parents, then over their handwritten letter. Fade to Travis being back on the job with the taxi company again and the other drivers all talking cheerfully and including him in their circle exactly the way they used to, only oh, hey, now he's got a fare! And oh, hey, it's Cybill Shepard!
And oh, hey, it turns out it's not November yet! Because her candidate guy is not only alive and well but won the primary and is now candidate for president!
bla bla bla implications that pretty pretty white lady is sexually interested in Travis now that he's not just the weirdo who took her to a porn movie but an actual killer of bad bad men bla bla Travis ignores this and drops her at her apartment and drives away smiling, good God this is an incel fantasy with the rapey parts removed. "I'll show that bitch, I'll DENY HER MY GLORIOUS COCK."
The credits roll after that.
Hint: if your movie is supposedly showing the terrible things that macho does to a guy, and that the way a man becomes best under the expectations of machismo is to become psychotically violent, maybe don't reward him in the last five minutes with heroism and offers of sex from perfect white blonde ladies.
Also hint: in 1976 New York, if the cops come running into an apartment where gunshots have been fired, and they find three dead guys and a blood-covered guy with a mohawk and multiple guns on his person and a wound on his neck, and a twelve-year-old girl sobbing hysterically in the corner, they are not going to say "my God, a hero charged in here and killed bad men! we must save him!" They are going to say "Oh, God, some sick fuck came here looking for underage sex and the deal went wrong. Put him on an ambulance to Bellevue and don't bother hurrying, nobody's going to miss him if he dies." And then they are going to put the guy's picture in the Daily News and maybe the New York Post, and the Secret Service guy who spotted the guy in the mohawk among the crowd at the campaign rally and got his protectee out of there will say "THAT guy, he's the one!", and when Travis wakes up from his coma, assuming he wakes up at all because this is 1976 New York, there will be feds. Multiple kinds of fed, because Travis never got permits for those guns- he says this when he shoots the guy in the bodega- so the Secret Service will be there along with the BATF. Even if the Secret Service isn't there, the NYPD would have checked out the guns and found them unregistered and the BATF would have been involved. And since Travis mailed a sheaf of hundred dollar bills to Jodie Foster before going off to the campaign rally, with a letter saying "this is for you, by the time you get this I'll be dead", he'll be on record as having a premeditated plan of committing a felony.
There is no possible way on God's green earth that a man in a mohawk found covered in blood and falling unconscious in the presence of a shrieking teenage prostitute and three dead men sometime in the month of June would be investigated, found blamelessly heroic, and released back to his everyday job to the praises of the New York press sometime between August and November. (Cybill Shepard's guy was referred to as having been chosen as the presidential candidate, so that's after the nomination, which was in August of 1976, but before the election, and probably not too late in October because nobody looked like they were wearing cold weather clothes. Although I'm not holding them too much to clothing clues because nobody looked like they were hot and sweaty during the June scenes, either.)
The only way the last five minutes of the movie make any sense at all is if everything that happens after Travis makes eye contact with the first cop through the door and mimes blowing his own head off is Travis's dying incel fantasy.
Like I said in the cut-text, uggggggggggggggggggh.
Long story short: if you want to see an unrelentingly grim movie about one man's alienation from society and his fellow man and how it drives him to insanity and violence in New York of the 1970s... watch Joker. Better character establishment, better exploration of motive and personality, less incel grossness. And it still has Robert DeNiro.
For a brief few minutes after I resumed watching- I was more like 40-45 minutes in rather than half an hour, if someone else is concerned about plot points- Travis developed something of a personality. He went from a vague "I wanna ... I wanna do something" conversation with Peter Boyle to buying a bunch of guns from a guy in a hotel room, and the montage of him learning to modify them and practicing with them showed him as finally being interested in something, even if it was just being a gun nut.
I am not calling real world people who are super into the modification and range use of guns 'gun nuts'. Travis's montage gave the impression of obsession.
Then it started going downhill again and he got all obsessed with the political candidate that Cybill Shepard worked for. And I don't know if Scorsese planned it that way, but it felt like a case of 'the bitch who turned me down has an interest in another man, I will punish her for that interest by killing him'. The Jodie Foster bits... did not help either. Maybe he was supposed to be suddenly caring and empathetic towards her, I don't know; what I saw was a guy who decided that he was going to Save The Prostitute Whatever The Cost, and who attempted multiple conversations with her without actually talking to her. I mean, she was there and he addressed his remarks to her, but it felt like he was having a conversation with his mental image of a Sweet Virginal Helpless Twelve Year Old Girl Trapped By Horrible Men In A Horrible Life Completely Against Her Sweet Virginal Will and meanwhile here's Jodie Foster on the couch next to him or across the table from him going "you're weird, I'm not doing as well as I'd like but you don't understand me so come on, chill out".
White-knighting the sweet virginal helpless twelve year old blonde white girl, you understand. I couldn't help but wonder exactly how worked up he'd get if the twelve year old prostitute character were Puerto Rican or African-American. Given that the first person he shot in the movie was a black teenager robbing a local bodega, and that he didn't so much as blink or bat an eye, and given the casual racism of other characters around him, my guess is not at all.
Anyway, it just felt like Elliot Rodger, The Movie, except without the delusions of grandeur that the Isla Vista killer was prone to. And to be fair, the impression that I have is that Rodger was significantly smarter than Travis Bickle. But it felt like an incel who didn't have access to the internet to express his isolation and inability to interact with other humans in a reasonable way, and when he went bugnuts on Jodie Foster's pimp, Jodie Foster's pimp's assistant, and a random criminal type who showed up during the shooting, I was actively rooting for Jodie Foster's pimp because at least he was interesting- skin-crawlingly sleazy, but there was more to him than there was to Travis. (Nothing against Robert DeNiro. His performance was great. The character as written? Was not great.)
And then the last five minutes.
The only way the last five minutes of this movie make any fucking sense is if everything after Bickle makes a finger-gun gesture at his own head represents his dying dreams of glory. Travis makes the aforementioned gun suicide gesture and passes out. The NYPD comes into the room where he's bleeding out from a bullet wound that grazed his neck, and where the pimp and pimp assistant are dead and Jodie Foster is screaming in the corner; there's a dead guy in the hallway. Camera pulls back to show reporters in the street. Fade to images of newspaper clippings on an apartment wall calling the young taxi driver a hero for killing these guys and saving a twelve year old girl from their clutches. Voiceover of a man reading a letter from Jodie Foster's parents thanking him for saving their daughter and returning her to them, a letter written while Travis is in a coma. Camera pans over newspaper article showing two seriously older-looking people who are supposedly Jodie Foster's parents, then over their handwritten letter. Fade to Travis being back on the job with the taxi company again and the other drivers all talking cheerfully and including him in their circle exactly the way they used to, only oh, hey, now he's got a fare! And oh, hey, it's Cybill Shepard!
And oh, hey, it turns out it's not November yet! Because her candidate guy is not only alive and well but won the primary and is now candidate for president!
bla bla bla implications that pretty pretty white lady is sexually interested in Travis now that he's not just the weirdo who took her to a porn movie but an actual killer of bad bad men bla bla Travis ignores this and drops her at her apartment and drives away smiling, good God this is an incel fantasy with the rapey parts removed. "I'll show that bitch, I'll DENY HER MY GLORIOUS COCK."
The credits roll after that.
Hint: if your movie is supposedly showing the terrible things that macho does to a guy, and that the way a man becomes best under the expectations of machismo is to become psychotically violent, maybe don't reward him in the last five minutes with heroism and offers of sex from perfect white blonde ladies.
Also hint: in 1976 New York, if the cops come running into an apartment where gunshots have been fired, and they find three dead guys and a blood-covered guy with a mohawk and multiple guns on his person and a wound on his neck, and a twelve-year-old girl sobbing hysterically in the corner, they are not going to say "my God, a hero charged in here and killed bad men! we must save him!" They are going to say "Oh, God, some sick fuck came here looking for underage sex and the deal went wrong. Put him on an ambulance to Bellevue and don't bother hurrying, nobody's going to miss him if he dies." And then they are going to put the guy's picture in the Daily News and maybe the New York Post, and the Secret Service guy who spotted the guy in the mohawk among the crowd at the campaign rally and got his protectee out of there will say "THAT guy, he's the one!", and when Travis wakes up from his coma, assuming he wakes up at all because this is 1976 New York, there will be feds. Multiple kinds of fed, because Travis never got permits for those guns- he says this when he shoots the guy in the bodega- so the Secret Service will be there along with the BATF. Even if the Secret Service isn't there, the NYPD would have checked out the guns and found them unregistered and the BATF would have been involved. And since Travis mailed a sheaf of hundred dollar bills to Jodie Foster before going off to the campaign rally, with a letter saying "this is for you, by the time you get this I'll be dead", he'll be on record as having a premeditated plan of committing a felony.
There is no possible way on God's green earth that a man in a mohawk found covered in blood and falling unconscious in the presence of a shrieking teenage prostitute and three dead men sometime in the month of June would be investigated, found blamelessly heroic, and released back to his everyday job to the praises of the New York press sometime between August and November. (Cybill Shepard's guy was referred to as having been chosen as the presidential candidate, so that's after the nomination, which was in August of 1976, but before the election, and probably not too late in October because nobody looked like they were wearing cold weather clothes. Although I'm not holding them too much to clothing clues because nobody looked like they were hot and sweaty during the June scenes, either.)
The only way the last five minutes of the movie make any sense at all is if everything that happens after Travis makes eye contact with the first cop through the door and mimes blowing his own head off is Travis's dying incel fantasy.
Like I said in the cut-text, uggggggggggggggggggh.
Long story short: if you want to see an unrelentingly grim movie about one man's alienation from society and his fellow man and how it drives him to insanity and violence in New York of the 1970s... watch Joker. Better character establishment, better exploration of motive and personality, less incel grossness. And it still has Robert DeNiro.
