(2016) Taxi Driver

Initially, Taxi Driver seems really vague as to what is terribly wrong with with Travis, but it's painfully obvious from the beginning that something is. Him acting like “just a freak” didn't help much, although in hindsight, I suppose how he behaves should be a good clue. But it wasn't a good one for me, and I was left perplexed after he took Betsy to a porno theatre. Why would anyone do that to a woman he wants to date? Then, everything is explained very briefly: “Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. […] I'm God's lonely man.” There's very little about Travis that can't be understood along those thoughts. He is mentally able, but his social skills are based mostly on mimicking, so his behavior is a strange combination of confident, goofy, and mannered. He wants to conquer women by saving them from things they don't even want to be saved from – a lonely kid's unconscious idea about making a girl grateful. He is talking to himself in the mirror. He blames the “scum” for all of his problems because he don't even have personal enemies for this purpose. Most of his issues and actions seem like illustrations of his condition as it gets worse – or, rather, as he intentionally dives deeper and deeper in what seems like madness, in a seek of redemption. I was very much surprised by Hoberman briefly comparing Taxi Driver to Apocalypse Now, but it makes great sense: both lonely antiheroes Travis and Willard seem to spiral down in chaos, but there's something quite conscious about their descent, and they don't end up insane, but rather find their redemption – even if we are left with a feeling that they have a long way to climb black from “the heart of darkness”. What makes it really hard to find them similar at first is probably that Travis is embarrassingly realistic. We might have liked Willard and maybe even Kurtz, too, but not Travis. He is some of both and even worse, or at least that's how we feel about him.