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All Images Credited to: Columbia Pictures.
Some films I return to every so often, every couple of years, just to look at again. Just to examine them and see if with time, age and greater knowledge, there’s new things to find, whether it’s moments viewed from a new perspective, new interpretations on images, or appreciation for techniques that I failed to notice before, perhaps elements of performances that did not resonate initially. In many cases, coming back, the films are often lesser than I recalled. The more distance that has passed, the more likely I will find things that irk me or disappoint me, or I find the visual approach more bland and generic. One of the risks of exploring art, developing personal tastes, and deepening appreciation, is that it becomes harder to like things, or to not find faults or failings that otherwise might have gone unacknowledged. It can be disappointing, even painful, not liking something as you once did.
Taxi Driver I looked back on around a week ago.
One of the most readily recommended films, one of the most acclaimed; one of the (near) universally agreed ‘greats’ of American cinema. A film its director summarises in one word as ‘loneliness’. Travis Bickle identifies himself as ‘god’s lonely man’. He spends much of the film alone, in his small and misbegotten apartment. He has limited connection with anyone: when he meets with the other cab drivers he sits at the end of the table and watches, with strange intensity, his pill dissolve in water. He has no romantic partner, no close friends and he mostly interacts with notable emotive distance, unsure of the appropriate boundaries with others: he is either at ill-ease, or perhaps too forthcoming, too close, too demanding with a stranger. Travis is a fundamentally unhappy character. His life is devoid of meaning, of achievement. In one scene he writes a letter to his parents, one the audience can tell is full of distortions, misrepresentations and lies. At such moments, Travis Bickle appears ashamed of himself and his life, imagining an alternative reality where he has all the things that elude him: love, connection, a respectable job, a place to exist. Plagued…
