Psyop Cinema
patreon
Brett's Taxi Driver Notes
🕑 Added 2024-03-11 20:43:30 +0000 UTCTaxi Driver (1976)[1]
Summary (for intro)
Taxi Driver is the first cinematic entry in the Joker Cycle, which is one particularly sinister instantiation/use of the cybernetic feedback loop between fiction/fantasy/entertainment/Hollywood and real life, an application of said feedback loop that operates by confusing and ideally even dissolving the boundary between the viewer’s sense of reality and of the fictional world depicted on screen.
As we’ll discuss, Scorsese and Schrader highlight this reality confusion as a central theme of the movie, and it’s how they expressly define insanity (as the inability to tell reality from fiction). The same alleged inability to distinguish fantasy and reality afflicted Hinckley and Chapman. Hinckley, as most of our listeners probably know, used the defense that he shot newly inaugurated Present Ronald Reagan because he was obsessed with Jodie Foster (whom he thought he would impress by shooting Reagan), an obsession he supposedly developed from watching Taxi Driver countless times, to the point of identifying directly with protagonist Travis Bickle.
Premiered at Cannes to much controversy, both over the sexualization of 12-year-old Jodie Foster and over the potential that it would stir up more violence, in the wake of so many assassinations.
The movie’s background, illicit purpose, I believe, is to create/reinforce “the profile” (a la Mindhunter) to explain these kinds of bizarre crimes to the public, crimes which are actually covert ops. The other, darker purpose, I think, is to create more Bickles out there, which further reinforces the profile while spreading psychosis in possibly the most efficient way that the cultural engineers of the day knew how.
Background
Brian De Palma
It was Brian De Palma, one of Scorsese’s best friends, who presented him with Schrader’s script. Did De Palma ghostwrite it, or at least feed Schrader the story, as he may have done for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on Good Will Hunting? Schrader came to major success, in any case, with DePalma’s help, just like Bruce Joel Rubin.
De Palma is also the person who gave the script to Michael Phillips, who produced the movie with his former wife Julia Phillips. So he is the impetus behind this movie.
DePalma also put Scorsese in touch with legendary composer Bernard Herrmann, whose haunting, dreamy score was his last job, as he died before the score was nominated for an Academy Award. Herrmann had done the score for De Palma’s 1976 film Obsession, written with Paul Schrader. Herrmann also scored De Palma’s Sisters (1972).
I suspect Schrader was put up to this assignment by De Palma, who I think suggested the deranged Vietnam vet angle. Schrader says he was walking around New York at the time wearing a Marine jacket and cowboy boots. Why? “It was just what I was wearing” is his only explanation. Perhaps he was doing a bit of “method acting” himself, getting into character to write the script he was assigned. Should we assume that only actors were influenced by “the Stanislavski system”?
De Palma directed a film released in 1970 titled Hi, Mom! starring De Niro as either a real or larping Vietnam vet (cf. Schrader) named Jon Rubin. The synopsis says he’s a Vietnam vet, but the distinction doesn’t matter much in the context of the film, which aims to break down the separation between fiction and reality. The film’s Revelation of the Method centerpiece, for example, is a black power performance art piece, in which Rubin is cast as a cop after claiming to be a Vietnam vet; the performance culminates in a breakdown of said barrier, as the black “actors” in whiteface rape a white woman in blackface “for real” while being filmed. Afterward, the white victims all exit as satisfied customers, giving their testimonials to the camera. As De Palma’s film progresses, it becomes less clear with each succeeding scene whether this is Rubin’s reality or his fantasy (which is directly related to the technique employed by Scorsese, discussed below).
In the last sequence, the De Niro character blows up his building and then revisits the scene to give an angry, reactionary, half-coherent speech. In the course of it, he identifies himself as a demolition expert in Vietnam and says that it’s his expert opinion that “only an expert” could have committed the crime. His last line is, “Hi, mom,” implying that his real motivation, like that of De Palma, is to be noticed/watched/famous. This, of course, ties in with the “profile” discussed below. Earlier, Rubin reads a passage from a book titled “The Urban Guerrilla” to the effect that group action is too risky because of the danger of infiltration by intelligence organizations, so individual, lone wolf actions are the future.
Paul Schrader
Paul Schrader says it was “the rebellion of it all that first attracted me” to the profession, and then “the films themselves,” although he had seen very few before entering UCLA film school. He went to Columbia University one summer to take some film courses, “just to see films,” “and that summer, through an odd serendipity, I met Pauline Kael, who offered to be my mentor,” and also got him into UCLA film school to be a film critic. Was involved in the counterculture, including anti-war protests, while at UCLA.
Background to writing Taxi Driver, says Schrader, was not only breakup of a marriage and subsequent relationship and other difficulties but his quitting AFI “in protest to George Stevens’s policies.”
He wrote it in ten days, he claims, while living by himself in the apartment of his now ex-girlfriend. Sometimes he says he was living “out of his car” and even “sleeping in [his] car,” which gives the impression that he was homeless and penniless, which he was not. It “sprung from me like an animal” while in a distraught state of mind, floundering personally and professionally He was not talking to anyone, was coming out on peepshows and porn, and developed stomach problems like Travis. This background, true or not, is repeated ad nauseum to bolster the artistic credibility and idiosyncrasy of the project: this is the work of a man who lives his art, a starving artist dependent on pure inspiration, waiting for the miracle to burst forth, which it finally does, “like an animal.”
Given De Palma’s role in introducing this project to Scorsese, Schrader’s collaboration with De Palma on Obsession, the fact that De Palma had already cast De Niro as a “deranged Vietnam vet,” along with De Palma’s psyop pedigree—all of this suggests to me that De Palma is responsible at least the deranged Vietnam vet who-loses-touch-with-reality angle. Given his probable role in ghostwriting at least one other “great film” so-called (Good Will Hunting), I think he probably had an even greater role and that he conspired with Schrader to keep his name out of it.
In the laser disc commentary,[2]Scorsese says that the script for this and for King of Comedy stand out to him, because of all the scripts he’s ever seen these were perfectly written “in a funny way,” as if just for Scorsese and De Niro. Schrader denies having De Niro or Scorsese in mind, but De Palma, who had already cast De Niro as a Vietnam vet and in two other roles, may have.
Remember that Schrader goes on to direct movies like Patty Hearst, which depicts the brainwashing of Patty Hearst at the hands of Manchurian candidate Donald DeFreeze. Only of course the movie attributes to DeFreeze Manson-like brainwashing skills with no reference to the CIA or MKUltra or Operation Chaos , thereby solidifying the official narrative (mostly drawn from Hearst’s memoir), as such “psyop surgeries” are meant to do.[3]The fact is DeFreeze was a known Fed asset almost certainly brainwashed in Vacaville, a known MKUltra stronghold familiar to viewers of Fincher’s Mindhunter series. He was deliberately allowed to escape after being transferred to a low-security facility (one that comes up in my Salva episode).
Certainly Schrader did nothing to annoy the CIA, which supported with 2014 film Dying of the Light.
In the Taxi Driver commentary, Schrader mentions the case of Sara Jane Moore(whom he erroneously refers to as Sara Ann Moore), who took a shot at Gerald Ford in 1975, within weeks of Manson Family member Squeaky Fromme’s assassination attempt on Ford—the only two women ever to make an attempt on a president’s life. Moore was also a known Fed asset. Schrader said the incident impressed upon him that “all it takes to get on the cover of Newsweek is to shoot at the president and miss.” This, he says, informed the “irony” of the ending of Taxi Driver. (I thought he wrote the script years before and had a miniscule role in rewrites?) In a word, we have yet another Manchurian candidate case (Arthur Bremer, DeFreeze, Moore) that Paul Schrader is concerned to whitewash.
In his studied comments regarding the psychopathology of Travis Bickle and the film’s dark legacy, Schrader invests all moral responsibility in the deranged, isolated, individual weirdo. “Travis’s hell is a psychological hell,” explains Schrader, “not a physical hell.” So the urban conditions and the toxic culture are not at all blame—quite a departure from the usual liberal understanding of antisocial behavior. But even more so than Targets, Taxi Driver could easily be predicted to appeal to the very types of people likely to be triggered by it.
In the laser disc commentary, Schrader furthermore says that the film is morally justified because “the element of the film that caters to violence is counterpointed by the element of the film that shows violence to be genuinely psychotic and this character to be psychotic.” In another commentary, he speaks of the salutary effect of film in terms sometimes used by apologists of the horror genre, that is, he says it “exposes to the daylight of drama” the dark, demonic side of man, thereby “you defuse these evil elements of their power. I really do think it works.” And maybe he does.
There was talk of making the movie in San Francisco, according to Scorsese, but he insisted on New York. Schrader says Chicago was considered and dropped as well because supposedly the cab didn’t carry the same “metaphorical value” there.
Martin Scorsese
In the same commentary, Scorsese explains that because he had asthma as a kid he went to either church or the movies, and in both cases, either from the “ritual of the mass” or from the experience of the cinema, time would stop and you would “lose yourself” and it would become “like a dream state” and “you’d be really shocked when you came out,” especially when the bright light of the day hit you.
Vic Magnotta
Vic Magnotta[mag-knot-a,] whom Scorsese met at NYU (and, he says, worked with him on other projects…which?) and who served with Special Forces in Vietnam, suggested the mohawk look to Scorsese, since many of these extreme Special Forces guerilla warriors would do things like that to take on the warrior persona. Magnotta also plays the “Secret Service photographer” in the film.
Magnotta died working as a stuntman on the set of The Squeeze (1986), on the cover of which is an image of Michael Keaton being squeezed between the crumbling Twin Towers. Two factors indicate that this death may not have been an accident. First, the death was the result of a mistake that rarely occurs, involving the installation of the windshield of the car that Magnotta drove into the water. He drowned, i.e., died in water, with all the occult significance that carries with it.
The other factor is a scene from the Richard Rush movie The Stunt Man (1980), which is the ultimate meta-movie, self-recursive psyop film. The lead character is a traumatized Vietnam vet named Cameron (Steve Railsback) hiding out on the set of a movie as a stuntman and hence completely at the mercy of the director, played by Peter O’Toole as the archetypal master manipulator film director, who exercises hypnotic control seemingly over everyone on the set. He is at pains to explain to Cameron why he must perform the dangerous stunt of crashing a car into the water—the exact stunt that, within the diegesis of the film, killed the previous stuntman, and that, in real life, killed Vic Magnotta. Perceptive viewers will notice how often cars crash into the water in movies (I’m thinking of a very memorable scene in the psyop film Strange Days as I type) and how often it’s totally unnecessary. Some of these viewers may be aware of the ritual significance of water and killing in water.
In the following scene in The Stunt Man, Cameron is lead into a screening room to witness the death of the previous stuntman while performing the stunt he’s about to perform. To reinforce the director’s power over him, the police are in the room, with Cameron knowing that the director can identify him at any moment. As he leaves the room, one of the cops says, “It’s amazing your still alive considering who you’re working for,” to which O’Toole says, to Cameron, “Come along; we have time to kill you yet.”
Incidentally, Rush admitted, in the audio commentary to this film, that he spliced in subliminal images—I believe when Cameron is being shown the film.
Magnotta had worked with Scorsese as an actor in a short and in Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Scorsese’s debut. Magnotta has about 60 credits for stunt jobs, including stunt coordinator. He was the stunt coordinator in De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1981), Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984), and in 2987, the same year as The Squeeze, Ishtar and The Believers (1987).
In short, was Vic Magnotta killed in a kind of human sacrifice sometimes performed with stuntmen? Was he part of a world where Hollywood, psyops, and intelligence activity constantly overlap?
The cover of The Stunt Man, incidentally, is the devil behind a movie camera, sometimes with the tagline, “If God could do the tricks that we can do, he’d be a happy man.” Read: Satan runs Hollywood.
Robert De Niro
De Niro is the son of Bohemian New York painters (his mother had been friends with Anais Nin). His parents separated when he was two after his father announced that he was gay.
De Niro started taking acting classes by the age of 10 at the Dramatic Workshop, an acting program associated with the New School for Social Research, long a Rockefeller-funded hub for “cultural Marxism” and the like. His mother worked there as a typist. “Among the faculty,” according to Wikipedia, “were Lee Strassberg and Stella Adler, who were two of the leading gurus of “method acting,” of which De Niro would become probably the most famous practitioner, along with Marlon Brando, who also attended the Dramatic Workshop as a child. De Niro debuted on stage, age 10, as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. He later attended Rhodes Preparatory School, the New York prep school that was the model for the school in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
He would go on to study under Lee Strassberg and Stella Adler. What I can find says he took classes from Maria Piscator, wife of Erwin Piscator, who founded the Workshop. So-called method acting, or the “Stanislavski system,” unlike many other approaches to acting, calls for a psychological breakdown between the actor’s own personality and that of the character—a breakdown that mirrors the intended breakdown between the viewer’s sense of reality and the reality presented by the diegesis of the film.
De Niro’s relationship to De Palma goes back to at least 1963, when he appeared in De Palma’s The Wedding Party, which was not released until 1969.
Addendum on Targets (1968)
Targets (1968), directed by New Hollywood court historian Peter Bogdanovich, as the first New Hollywood predictive programming sus film re: the deranged mass shooter/spectacular criminal, in the context of a media feedback loop involving the breakdown of the barrier between fiction and reality, first within the killer and then on screen (implying the breakdown of the viewer’s separation from the diegesis of the film).
The last sequence of the film, in which the shooter opens fire from behind the screen at a drive-in theater, is a grand metaphor for cinematic psychological warfare[4]: the killer shoots at patrons of a drive-in theater from behind the screen, as they watch another Roger Corman-produced movie starring the co-star of this film, Boris Karloff.
From Wikipedia:
Produced by Roger Corman and written by Polly Platt and Bogdanovich, the film was loosely inspired by Charles Whitman, a mass shooter who committed the Tower shooting at the University of Texas in 1966.[3] The film was shot in late 1967 in the Los Angeles area.
Because of its release by Paramount Pictures shortly after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the studio's executives chose to market the film as a commentary on gun violence in the United States, fearing its content would alienate audiences otherwise, but it was ultimately a box-office bomb.[4] Despite its commercial failure, the film was well-received by critics, and was included in the 2003 book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.
…
In the film's finale at a drive-in theater, Orlok [Karloff character named for Count Orlock of Nosferatu—the old-fashioned, traditional screen monster who always obeyed the rules—confronts the new, realistic, nihilistic late-1960s "monster" in the shape of a clean-cut, unassuming multiple murderer.
…
American International Pictures offered to release, but Bogdanovich wanted to try to see if the film could get a deal with a major studio. It was seen by Robert Evans of Paramount Pictures, who bought it for $150,000, giving Corman an instant profit on the movie before it was even released.[9]
Although the film was written and production photography completed in late 1967, it was not released until after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and that of Robert F. Kennedy in the summer of 1968, thus having some topical relevance to then-current events.[6] Executives for Paramount, unsure of how the film would be received by the public, marketed it in a manner that portrayed it as a political film commenting on firearms, which alienated it from the public, resulting in it become a box-office failure.[6]
In the final scene, the shooter, trying to make his escape once again, has climbed down from behind the screen. When he looks up, he sees Karloff on the screen walking toward him, and then when he turns from the screen, there’s the real Karloff walking toward him, only he can’t tell the different, i.e., the difference between reality and fantasy/fiction has broken down for him, which Scorsese will say (see below) is the definition of insanity. But New Hollywood was already working hard to break down that barrier, and in the process the film is showing you—a la Revelation of the Method—one of the probable results. At the same time, the ending preemptively vindicates the filmmaker-magician: Karloff/Orlock walks up and slaps the shooter, who is reduced to an infantile state, the message being that this poor, deranged fool couldn’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality, as insiders/initiates can, and they’re to blame for their own troubles, not the people who conduct psyops against them. Cf. Schrader’s apology.
Bickle as Proto-Incel and Dark Self
Scrader says the character “comes from” the archetype of “the outsider, the stranger.” Elsewhere he compares him to the “sick man, the underground man.” Also 20th-century existentialist literature in mind as he wrote. God’s Lonely Man and other critics note influence of “Psycho and The Searchers,” which also has a “semi-psychotic hero” trying to free a girl from captors he imagines to be evil but that liberals think is not or should not be portrayed as evil.
Bickle was the posterchild for a subtype of this archetype within the culture, one I think largely dreamed up by the entertainment industry and then imposed top-down. It’s very hard to deny that this movie is designed to trigger or at least egg on this type, as it existed or was being constructed circa 1976. Schrader often comes very close to admitting this, calling the story the “apotheosis” or “coming to glory” of a “psychopath,” a “psychopath’s Second Coming.”The ending was inspired by Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which Schrader saw as four men entering “psychopath’s heaven.” Clearly, this is moving toward the full-blown dark self complex of Joker.
Scorsese says Bickle emerging from the steam at the beginning of the movie is supposed to suggest that he’s emerging from hell. So he’s an infernal figure, a demonic figure, if not yet the devil as with the Joker archetype.
Schrader tells a story about one of the people he describes as “Taxi Driver kids” confronting him in his office. “Who told you about me?” the guy said. Schrader claims, possibly apocryphally, that he gave him a speech about the hundreds of thousands of other men who feel his pain. Schrader concludes, in this interview for the Taxi Driver documentary on the DVD release, “We had created the real thing.” More recently, Schrader made the opposite claim, that all the Travis Bickles already just happened to exist and, naturally, were not triggered by the movie; in this same interview, he admitted that John Hinckley, Jr., himself was writing him in the lead-up to the assassination attempt on Reagan and that he lied to the FBI about this. Was his story about the “Taxi Driver kid” actually an allusion to Hinckley?
The Profile
Taxi Driver develops the “profile” by which psychology will dispel conspiracyin the minds of the pseudo-sophisticated who harbor a morbid fascination with violence as a spectacle, as they’ve been taught to do by Hollywood. Synthetic MK-wackos are misperceived as organic “lone wolves.” (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore [1974] proved that Scorsese was willing to carry the bag for people with cultural engineering agendas; this was his next film.)
To fit the profile, one must usually be a “loner,” and this is one of the ultimate loner movies. Schrader describes the cab as an “iron coffin” and a “metaphor for loneliness,” which he says is the “theme” of the film.
The scene where Travis elbows up to the Secret Service guy, plus his (apparently fabricated) claims to Iris and his parents that he’s working for the government, satisfy the part of the profile that says spectacle criminals are drawn toward police and authority. And that’s why, e.g., Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy were close to cops and politicians—not, of course, because they were involved in covert ops. And if they say otherwise, it’s because delusions of grandeur are all par for the profile. These guys act just like intelligence operatives programmed to kill because, according to the on-tap official narrative, they’re acting out a fantasy and half-deluding themselves into thinking that’s what they are.
According to pop psychology legend, what precedes the murder sprees committed by the proto-incel/incel lone wolf spectacular criminal is a decisive breakdown of the barrier between fantasy and reality. Scorsese’s “definition of someone who goes crazy” is someone who “acts out his fantasies” like Travis (Cf. the advice that a psychiatrist, according to Fenton Bresler’s source, told Mark David Chapman: “Act out your fantasy.”). Of course, this film is famous for its psycho-cinematic stylization that consists in blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. Scorsese explains that he shot fantasy sequences in a manner indistinguishable from reality because such is the nature of fantasy.
Scorsese (laser disc commentary):
“I just thought that fantasy is so real to the person that’s having it. …It’s real to you, the feeling’s real to you, and therefore it should be portrayed the same way; it shouldn’t have fog on the edges and it shouldn’t have people zooming in and out on their faces. You should really do it as realistic as possible. And I think we did a lot of that straight ahead on the King of comedy, where we just cut directly, and the fantasies were right there—because they’re so vivid and they’re so real, because…fantasies and imagination are what makes people run, what makes you keep going in life.”
He compares Travis to Batman and asks the question if the Batman of the “new Batman film” (Burton’s 1989 film) is crazy.
And yet Scorsese is making a film about the breakdown of the boundary between fantasy and reality which mingles the two seamlessly in a way calculated to make the audience to some degree partake of that breakdown…bringing them that much closer to insanity, or the normal state of the method actor like Robert DeNiro (although it could be said that they act out other people’s fantasies).
Schrader chose a taxi driver to represent urban alienation because a taxi driver is practically invisible to those around him (and the taxi itself is like a spaceship, buffering him against the surrounding world, of which he is a disgusted spectator). He is a nobody among nobodies, and according to the profile, the spectacular criminal is motivated by his paltriness to be somebody, anybody taken seriously, merging infamy and fame, or transmuting infamy into fame (cf. The King of Comedy).
Schrader also claims that the ending is a comment on the valueless nature of media and celebrity, about how people who “really accomplish things” are ignored while brazen wackos are celebrated in the media. But these people weren’t really being celebrated yet in the media. Arthur Bremer, who helped inspire the story (weird that Schrader says he only “imagined” what was in the Bremer diary but was surprised to learn later, after it was published, how spot on he was), was not a popular media figure; when published, his diary was a commercial flop. Only later, after movies like Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, did this figure become akin to a celebrity, as critiqued in Natural Born Killers. So Taxi Driver actually is what Schrader claims it was critiquing, that is, it foists a morbid and valueless worldview on its audience, a worldview revolving around notoriety.
The movie takes a stab at explaining, in advance, how someone can be a fan/sympathizer/admirer of the person he kills (e.g., Sirhan Sirhan and Mark David Chapman). Travis is pro-Palantine before he’s anti-Palantine—and really he’s indifferent to Palantine personally.
Sc: Palatine represents “a liberal candidate” like the assassination victims of the Age of Assassination…but Travis “could care less” about his politics. Insists no real pattern to targeting of Palatine.
Mind control (micro) and Phoenix Program
The patch on his Army jacket reads, “King Kong Company, 1968-1970.” He wears another jacket with wings on the breast. See above re: Vic Magnotta.
In an overhead shot, as Travis writes in his journal about his infatuation with Betsy, there is an ace of spades visible on the top left corner of his desk, nearly at the center of the frame, though barely decipherable. The association of the ace of spades with psychological warfare is established cinematically in Apocalypse Now, and its connection to the Phoenix program comes out in an episode of Millennium, for instance; in Far from Home, which I analyzed in the Monarch series; and certainly more examples could be given.
Travis frequently drifts into trance (e.g., the Alka Seltzer shot), and by the end of the movie, his trance has become the diegesis, which I think is signaled by the famous overhead tracking shot, which seems to represent Travis completely and permanently separating from his body/reality. He appears hypnotized almost every time he’s watching TV, which he does frequently, and this may be an instance of Revelation of the Method (TV as mind control, macro-micro mind control parallel/feedback loop).
Is “the Wizard” (Peter Boyle) a handler (note Wizard of Oz allusion)? It’s the Wizard who gives the speech about how he “has no choice,” how personal fate is omnipotent, and how you “become your job”—messages that seem calculated to trigger his Special Forces-Delta programming.
Cultural Engineering
The feedback loop
With regard to the feedback loop, and its potential invocation in this movie, Schrader explains in his commentary track that the use of “chem-tone” (sp?) effect at beginning and end of film (color distortion effects) is meant to suggest that “the film is a loop,” that it ends where it began and “is going to happen again.” Likewise, Scorsese says he’s suggesting with final shots of Travis that he’s a “ticking time bomb” that’s going to explode again.
Schrader adds: “the next time I don’t think Travis will be so lucky.” He seems to be alluding to how the vigilante hero of the 70s (e.g., Death Wish) will be reduced to the outsider spectacular criminal incel scapegoat of the future through the repeated application of the feedback loop mechanism at work here.
The red jacketDe Niro wears on the date with Cybil Shepherd looks like the one Rupert wears on TV at the end of The King of Comedy. That jacket gets passed to Arthur Fleck in Joker, and each time the weird outsider who’s a ticking time bomb is slightly transformed, each time becoming more and more of a loser.
Picked spot where “Joe Columbo was shot” for the assassination. The place, he said,
had a vibrancy because of that to me, that it was a place where there was bloodshed a few years ago, in such a public area.” “I thought it was important to have it in a place where such a thing had occurred, because of the tragedy of what’s happening in our country since 1963 It’s like having it in a place that already been consecrated by blood—whether innocent or guilty, we’re not to judge. But a tragedy also occurred there a few years earlier. But it’s very, very important to have it in a place like that because of what had happened since 1963 between JFK and Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X…and so many of the great leaders killed.
Implied ritual component of political assassinations, themselves obviously implicated in the feedback loop.
It’s necessary to try to make something of the heavy-handed references to Kris Kristofferson’s song “Pilgrim Chapter 33,” with its lyrics about a “walking contradiction” that, as just about everyone knows, Schrader says is at the core of his characterization of Travis. Never mind Schrader for the moment—Kristofferson is a sus figure, whose father was an Air Force general and who went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship before casting himself as a crusty, red-blooded folk singer and indie actor (more below under “Monarch”). The song has the Masonic magic number, and it opens with a list of the people who inspired it, beginning with Dennis Hopper and Johnny Cash, i.e., cultural “outlaws,” a subtype of the outsider archetype to which the feedback loop (as well call it) pertains.
The song appears on the 1971 album, The Silver-Tongued Devil and I, on the cover of which Kristofferson appears looking like a dead ringer for Charles Manson. (I wonder if the following Leonard Cohen lyric, from the song “The Future,” is directed at Kristofferson: “…all the lousy little poets comin’ round tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson.”) The figure of Kristofferson is also partly a double image, which gestures toward themes of dissociation and mind-controlled alters that figure into the Joker Cycle.
This helps a bit to explain how Betsy can see Travis as “the pilgrim,” notwithstanding his pertinent objection that he’s not a pusher, etc. The fact is that the outsider/outlaw archetype is governed by the trickster, the clown, so it shifts and metamorphoses—from left to right, etc.
Film marquees
Film marquees displayed include Mr. Majestyk and The Eiger Sanction—both, as the author of No Joke points out, about Vietnam vets “who find themselves in post-service conflicts.” Look up plot of/watch Eiger Sanction, about an assassin posing as an art professor who works for some secret government agency.
Movies playing as Travis drives past: Texas Chain Massacre and, in smaller font beneath that, Return of the Dragon(which is Way of the Dragon)—intimations of trauma-based shock cinema programming and of the Satanic force lurking behind 70s cinema. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, probably as a representative of the 70s shock films that were deliberate psychological warfare campaigns. Remember Scorsese’s comments on the Letterman appearance from 1982, when he was promoting The King of Comedy. Scorsese quotes an unnamed British critic, quote, “If you don’t really appreciate the horror genre, you really have no idea of film itself.” What’s getting at, as I mention in recent premium episode on Hollywood p-e-d-o Victor Salva, is that the horror genre strips filmmaking down to pure audience manipulation.
The blacksploitation movie Bucktown (1975) is playing in cinema next to the one showing Eiger Sanction.
In another shot, we can see From China with Death (1974) and “7 Blows of the Dragon” (1972), produced by the Shaw Brothers company, which included Run Run Shaw, one of the main financiers of Blade Runner.
Porn chic
The porn movie Travis takes Betsy to is Sometime Sweet Susan(1975), which involves a girl being sexualized in a mental institution. In the clip shown in the movie, there’s a reference to Masters and Johnson studies, which, along with Kinsey’s “research,” was a critical component in the sexual revolution psyop. Note, in this scene, how Betsy is being almost psychologically tortured by exposure to it. Revelation of the Method: sleaze cinema as psycho-spiritual terrorism.
There was a very brief period in the early 70s, which had ended by the time Taxi Driver was released, in which porn was considered chic and fashionable by the artistic crowd and there was a concerted effort to make pseudo-sophisticated, avant-garde porn. Sometime Sweet Susan emerges from this milieu, as does Anita: Swedish Nymphet, a 1973 erotic film starring Stellan Skarsgard, who has gone on to star in a long list of cultural engineering films, from the Marvel Universe (he plays the older scientist in the Thor movies) to David Fincher Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to several Lars Von Trier movies, and more.
Both are foreign (read “artsy”) films that take an “unconventional” approach to porn as does Swedish Marriage Manual (1969), the other movie advertised on the marquee with Sometime Sweet Susan and also coming from the director of Anita, if, that is, it’s one of the Language of Love movies that Swedish Marriage Manual is an alternate title. The first and maybe all of the Language of Love movies parade as a “sex educational film.”
In the “God’s Lonely Man” documentary, Schrader explains origins of porn chic.
In the 60s, when Schrader was in art school, some of the theaters that screened European art films by people like Bergman started screening erotic European films to make a buck. The film society to which Schrader belonged (at UCLA? Columbia?) “started reviewing these,” which caused “a great furor.”
Travis latches onto the effort to normalize porn by the art crowd to justify his own indulgence in the “gutter world” that he “despises,” in the words of Schrader.
In the first half of Hi, Mom!, the De Niro character, who presents himself as a “peep artist” (he’s trying to sell his voyeuristic films to a producer), can be seen waltzing through the porn chic district in its brief heyday circa. 1970. Remember that by the end of the film De Niro is or is posing as a reactionary of some sort, and a Vietnam vet to boot, a la Bickle. Did De Palma et al. see what was coming because they were in on the dialectical worldview of the elites?
Sexual revolution
Note the rock and roll posters all over the room in the brothel. These are the bitter fruits of the sexual revolution. The point is reinforced by Iris’s comparison between street life and a commune in Vermont. (Note that there is also Asian art and astrological art, indicating, again, that we are very much in the hippie world as it washed up in the mid-70s.
Notwithstanding these portraits of urban and sexual degradation meant to trigger people like Travis (whom Schrader admits deliberately torture themselves with the gutter world they hate, so he can assume “Taxi Driver kids” would do that too), Scorsese and Schrader confirm that they and those backing them actually share the perspective of the pimp and hoes and think of them as just an alternative “family.” He said he added the creepy scene of her dancing with Sport to prove that she’s not there against her will and that this is her “family” now. He wants to make sure the audience understands that “he doesn’t beat her; he doesn’t drug her.”
How does all of this wash today, with the heightened awareness about human trafficking, which has probably significantly proliferated since the 70s?
Remember too Schrader’s insistence that Travis’s “hell” is not “physical,” which blunts or removes altogether the otherwise implied social critique of 70s urban decay.
In short, Scorsese and Co. are very much on board with the ethos behind the porn chic that this film depicts in its ugly eclipse.
Scorsese even goes so far as to ascribe Travis’s outburst in part to his inability to own up to his attraction to the underage Iris. Very much a Frankfurt School viewpointhere, with sexual moderation (sexual “Calvinism,” as Schrader conceived the character) associated with an “authoritarian” personality type; hence, the solution to fascism is the the dissolution of traditional sexual mores and the traditional family structure itself. If only Travis were free to be a pedo, we wouldn’t have all this right-wing violence plaguing civilization today.
Against patriarchy, the father
Schrader says that, in targeting Palantine and then the pimp, Bickle is attacking “the failed father figure.” In his commentary track, he says Palantine refers to the Palatine Hill of ancient Rome. Thus, he is a symbol of the father via political authority (Rome being the model of Washington DC), and hence Travis is attacking “the patriarchy” without knowing what he’s doing.
Jodie Foster
Appeared in Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), starring Kris Kristofferson.
Foster says that, as a legal condition of her working for the production, she had to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to demonstrate that her participation in the film was not damaging her morals. Legally binding psychiatric care hearkens to Britney and other IMSAs. The reasoning in Jodie’s case is ironic, since almost every role she played in her youth was part of a concerted effort to undermine the morals of America’s youth and normalize teen delinquency, which was accomplished by the time 80s cinema trotted out its teen mutants (e.g., River’s Edge, but suss lord Tim Hunter).
Monarch tropes
The main hallmark of a Monarch film is that it depicts, usually in a glamorous or fetishistic way, the internal world of the mind control slave. See above re: the dreamlike quality of the film and the techniques used to translate Travis’s trance-states in the diegesis of the film.
Obviously, we’re dealing mainly with delta programming here, but there’s a large yellow butterflyprominently displayed directly between Foster and DeNiro in the diner scene, indicating her beta programming and perhaps his delta programming.
Travis’s delta programming possibly triggered by his mirror performance.
In the dénouement, Travis reflexively, “automatically” tries to kill himself as soon as he’s wiped out the brothel scum. This is clearly omega programming.
The salient references to Kris Kristofferson may also relate to Monarch.
The Method
Herrmann’s soundtrack, one of the greatest in cinema history, …dreamy, dissociative, either mimicking Travis’s mental state or otherwise apparently designed to keep pace with his warped sense of reality.
There are several scenes where Travis zones out and we with him. Scorsese says the bubbles in his alkaseltzer drink in one of these scenes is meant to suggest the Milky Way.
Misc.
Graffiti in brothel. Research. “Jesus loves you,” reads one.
Travis drives a checker cab. Not all cabs in the film or in real life were checker cabs.
Addendum on The Last Horror Film
Deliberate reaction to Taxi Driver-Hinckley saga, which is even worked into the plot of the movie, and a movie that hits just about every primary trope related to the feedback loop and then some. Over-the-top Revelation of the Method.
It even stars an actor from Taxi Driver, the first person seen in the film after De Niro: Joe Spinell, a major Hollywood insider who debuted in The Godfather, was close friends with Coppola, William Friedkin, and Sylvester Stallone. He played the proto-“Buffalo Bill” (Silence of the Lambs) character in Maniac (1980), produced by one of the writers of Last Horror Film (Judd Hamilton).
Directed by another deep Hollywood insider, David Winters (born David Weizer in London), an actor-producer-director whose first directing gigs were for two episodes of The Monkees show (Laurel Canyon cultural engineering).
Incidentally the to other writer, besides Hamilton and Winters, is Tom Klassen, who has virtually no credits but who is currently the talent manager of “Credence Entertainment,” whose offices are located in Laurel Canyon—or on Laurel Canyon Blvd., at any rate.
The lead actress/ritual victim is Caroline Munro, a British teen model who went on to be a Bond Girl. Wife of co-writer Judd Hamilton. She’s in Maniac as well.
Spinell plays Vinny, an overweight taxi driver who lives with his mother (similar to King of Comedy, which came out the same year, but I suspect the filmmakers here had some advance knowledge). Major inside baseball stuff re: Hollywood filmmaking and the feedback loop.
Central theme of breakdown of barrier between reality and fiction, as stated very heavy-handedly in scene where lead actress, in a press conference, defends movies against charges that they inspire crimes like Hinckley’s.
Feedback loop culminates in human sacrifice ritual orchestrated by master manipulator director, pulling strings of IMSA actress and incel loser/stalker. This is anticipated by opening scene with implied ritualistic/sex magic death in water by electrocution of woman. The removal of the eye motif and other Hollywood occult tropes crop up. In another scene, as Vinny obsesses over Jana, he images himself actually becoming her in conjunction with fantasizing about committing violence against her—definite “Big Mother” stuff.
Final ending a light-hearted vindication of the incel fantasy, similar to King of Comedy, reinforcing my suspicion that filmmakers had the inside track. Vinny cuts the head off the evil director (in a deliberate homage to Texas Chainsaw Massacre) to save the actress he stalked.
Kris Kristofferson at Cannes. Note that one of the two production companies behind the film, Winters Hollywood Entertainment Holdings Corporation, also produced the 1976 version of A Star Is Born, starring Kristofferson and alleged (by Brice Taylor) Monarch IMSA Barbara Streisand, the story of which also reflects the human sacrifice ethos of the music industry in particular. They were also
The profile in spades, including (gratuitously) posing as a police officer.
[1]Also contains extensive notes on Hi, Mom! (1970), The Stunt Man (1980), Targets (1968), Patty Hearst (1988), and The Last Horror Film (1982).
[2] The Blu-ray packaging says this is “the original 1986 commentary with director Martin Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader,” but Scorsese discusses Goodfellas (1990) as a completed project, so his part couldn’t have been recorded that early.
[3]There are, however, repeat flashbacks of Patty blindfolded in scenes from her youth; in one of these flashbacks, there are dolls and teddy bears in the frame.
[4]Note that this trope (firing at movie patrons from behind the silver screen) occurs in Gangster Squad (2013), in a scene featured in the trailers shown in the theater in Aurora moments before James Holmes, dressed as the Joker, supposedly attacked the patrons.
Comments
Simon
Harvey Keitel's character in the film references John Ford's 'The Searchers'. Ford was involved with naval intelligence - how convenient he was on Midway when the Japanese attacked to film it! Keitel was a one-syllable name starting with S like the protagonist in 'The Searchers' (Sport/Scar) and wears a bizarre get-up meant to suggest an Indian. Scar in 'The Searchers' has a layered meaning - exoterically, he's from a different race and that's why John Wayne hates him; esoterically, he's Wayne's shadow self who did what Wayne himself was too "civilised" to do to the woman he loved, his brother's wife. 'The Seachers' was written by Alan LeMay, brother of Curtis LeMay. All Wayne's - and De Niro's - suffering could have been prevented if only he'd integrated his shadow self - the classic Jungian prescription. The list of dodgy things about Jung is too long to recount here. This is why he pauses when he finally gets Natalie Wood in his arms - does he kill her, rape her or hug her? Hugging her symbolises his acceptance of racial difference - with the civil rights' movement just about to kick off. The list of dodgy things about Natalie Wood is also too long to list here. P.S. 1) Peter Boyle is definitely a member of a certain brotherhood - see for example 'Death and the Compass'. 2) Re bubbles - Springmeier says in one of his books that MK Ultra victims are told to put their trauma in a bubble and watch it float away. 3) In a 1975 TV movie 'The Deadly Tower', Kurt Russell plays Charles Whitman. Russell is of course an ex-Disney child actor. Whitman somehow got a large trunk full of weaponry to the top of his tower without anyone questioning him.
