every day for 40 years

 

Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro

on the set of Taxi Driver, 1975

"In America, anybody can become president.  That's one of the risks we take."

~ Adlai Stevenson

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        You Tube videos discussing the 1976 Martin Scorsese film, Taxi Driver, all say it's "about loneliness."  I tend to think it is about insanity.

"You talkin' to me?"

I used to think this line was from The Godfather (which I have not seen).  Then I thought it was from The Sopranos.  But it is not even a "Mafia quote" at all.  The taxi driver in Taxi Driver says, "You talkin' to me?" several times, alone in his NYC apartment, posing with a gun in front of a mirror, imagining himself saying this, threateningly, to someone out there on the streets.

        Robert De Niro, the actor portraying this character, told an interviewer, "Every day for 40 years someone has said:  You talkin' to me?"

reader comments from The Guardian

--------------- Masterpiece from the 70s, my favourite decade for films and music.

---------- ...It was a very European film....

------------ I think you're right.  There are plenty of equally grimy sleazy New York-based films from the same period, but for me the aesthetic in Taxi Driver harks back to film noir....

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________________ Taxi Driver -- not for children, and don't watch with anybody who might be sensitive to sleaze.  There's some famous violence in it, and some very violent, offensive, crazy talk.

(On Netflix or Amazon Prime, or maybe both, a show you are going to stream will have warnings in upper-left corner:  nudity; sex; violence; foul language; smoking...

        If I were in charge of this, I would take out "smoking" and replace it with gross talk and racial epithets.  Those, to me, are more offensive.  Smoking?  Seriously?  [Someone had to have lobbied for that to be in there.])

I was thinking, people who know me might question what I am even doing watching Taxi Driver.  Let's face it, Woody Allen or Katharine Hepburn are nowhere to be found in this menacing milieu, right?

        But I watched it the first time about 16 years ago, because I had seen a program  about how it was written and the themes, etc.  Paul Schrader the writer, and Martin Scorsese the director.  And I knew it was considered a classic, etc. -- I wanted to see it so that I would know about it.

        And I think it is a brilliant film.  I need to sit down and watch it, now, seeing all the visual communication and expression of it.  I've played it several times recently while doing other things, at home.  One can get the mood of it, doing that, but there's a lot of visual value that I'm missing.  I need to do this with Psycho, as well.  Just actually watch it.  Alfred Hitchcock was totally all about the visual.

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