Taxi Driver

“I’m God’s lonely man… June 8th. My life has taken another turn again. The days can go on with regularity over and over, one day indistinguishable from the next. A long continuous chain. Then suddenly, there is a change.” youve met me at a very travis bickle time in my life. (minus the causal slurs and dirty movies) (really i just have a cluttered apartment and bad haircut and i don’t sleep at all when it’s dark out and i wander the streets of this ghost town by my lonesome in the early hours of day and im watching a little too much tv lately) (also going delirous) if he also spent hours at the pool every afternoon instead of finding different women to patronize, it would really be too close to home it’s 50 years anniversary is this year. that’s very wild. while watching this morning, i found myself wandering about all the different ways people have come to understand it in that time. i think now it’s an interesting artifact of our society. someone watching in 1976 mightve found the seediness and violent parts somewhat jarring, when to todays gremlins of the world that’s pretty much the norm. like people back then probably understood a layer of it lost now, because they were of that actual moment. i would like to know what that was like. and today, at this point, it’s like so set in the stone of pop culture that travis bickle is constantly decontexualized (guilty) that it smooths over the character and it’s like the irony of the ending is echoed outside of the film too now, making it yet even more ironic. it’s a pretty much a whole different film these days because time has both popularized the film and made it normalized, and of course, the world and society has changed so much as well. im glad to have discovered it on my own in a time when i could still be shocked by its contents. in my experience and through the different phases of my life, it has taken on lots of meanings, both as its own film and what it’s meant to me. i think between the ages of about 13 to 15, i had watched this probably 50 times. and since, no more than 5 times. back then, i would say this was my favorite movie when asked, but as i grew older i didn’t “like” it that much at all. i can’t remember what about it made me like it so much in the first place, i think i thought it was real funny at first. and different. and i just loved de niro. jodie foster’s sunglasses were rad and i didn’t quite grasp the tragedy of her character yet. most of all, it opened my eyes to a new type of film with its art-house sensibilities though i couldn’t exactly put my finger on what made it different back then. then when i got older, it was a suddenly another film entirely, once i learned a little more and actually understood it, or thought i did. this was probably when i was most at the level and headspace Scorsese was trying to meet people at with the work. thats when i first saw the genius of it. but it was depressing and dark and i couldn’t enjoy it anymore just for its neon lights and “you talkin’ to me?”. even today, i think i try to avoid heavy, gritty movies like this sometimes because they make me feel too bad. but watching it tonight, older still, i feel i discovered yet another version of the film. ive almost done a 360 and back where i was almost ten years ago, enjoying it casually. ive recognized its a masterpiece and processed that, so now i was desensitized to the narrative with so many watches under my belt and the years of joking about travis bickle have caught up. while i know better than to sympathize with the actual character, i found myself now relating to his habits in a humorous way. because of this odd reality, i enjoyed it more than i have in recent years and it kind of was funny again. i don’t know what to make of that, whether that’s a good thing for me or bad in general. time is very funny