Taxi Driver (1976) +

A grueling and frank examination of the collateral damage wrought by stunted masculinity. This ür-text of the modern crisis of masculinity hinges upon the feral, elemental performance of Robert De Niro, whose characterization of the emotionally crippled Vietnam vet Travis Bickle remains a marvel of cinematic method acting. Yet the film falls into relief for me in the relationship that's established between De Niro's Travis and Jodie Foster's Iris, the child prostitute who instigates a fundamental shift in Travis's approach to the world. Basically, my read of this film is that Iris and Travis function as gendered embodiments of the film's core indictment of 1970s society. On the one hand, we have Travis, who's an adult man with no prospects, despite having been trained to be a killing machine by the same society that has no interest or investment in his future. On the other, we have Iris, a white girl child peddling her only assets (her sexuality) on the streets. When we see these two come together, in the strangely haunting "date" in the diner, we see that the two are basically peers -- emotionally compatible adolescents who aren't bad people (despite their respective skill at perpetrating violence or sex) but that they're lost in a society that's just not paying attention. Of course, on this point, the fact that the whole film operates with a major political campaign calling for change even as the city of New York seems to be decaying before our eyes -- it helps to make the point. This time through the film, I found it really profound how Travis was a character that was so socially stunted (he actually thinks that a porn movie is an appropriate first date) even as he had access to all the (anti)social privileges attending his adult, white maleness. I loved how Iris and Travis find their way to each other through the received language of respectable dating and how both are grasping for a future. I was also struck in screening this film this time that I had entirely forgotten the coda -- the fact that neither Travis nor Iris die in the devastation of the final shootout, that the film ends with both beginning life again. I'm told that the filmmakers saw the conclusion as leaving Travis cocked, a live wire ready to explode at any moment, and I don't see that as being not true. However, among a batch of films with largely largely dystopic conclusions, I was struck that the most dystopic film among them all actually had the most optimistic ending. It's an amazing film, rife with the most vicious misogyny -- yet something about the combined efforts of Foster and DeNiro elevate this film as one worth revisiting from time to time. (If only Cybill Shepherd weren't also part of the bargain...ack.)