It was when I was fifteen years old that a lot of things started to change for me in terms of my creative sensibilities. I'd been a pretty hardcore horror fan already for a few years at this point, and through my love of horror novels I was slowly but surely becoming a serious fan of the movies. But I was far from what you would call a cineaste.
When I was fifteen and a sophomore in high school, I took a video productions class. The teacher was Mrs. Duran, and she LOVED movies and managed to impart at least some of that love to the rest of us. Sure, we learned about cameras and got a rudimentary sense of scriptwriting and editing, but the part of the class I remember most was sitting around and simply talking about movies — what made them good and what made them important.
One of the ways you could get extra credit in this class was to watch movies and essentially write the equivalent of a book report about them. So I started raiding the local video store. Mrs. Duran dropped the names of a bunch of films in class, mostly things I'd either never heard of or had never really been interested in before. Turns out, a large number of those films were classics from the 1970s "new Hollywood." So, in a pretty naked effort to suck up, I wrote most of my "book reports" about the ones she mentioned.
And it was like the sky opened up for me.
There was "Apocalypse Now" (never heard of it). There was "The Godfather" (heard of it, but was convinced it would be insufferably boring). There was "The Wild Bunch" (a western, so yuck). There was "Midnight Cowboy" (rated X! Score!).
And, of course, there was "Taxi Driver."
It's hard for me to articulate the impact these films had on me . I was gripped by an incredibly dark imagination and had been for most of my life, but at this stage I was still pretty wrapped up in fantastical stories about monsters and vampires and ghosts and your typical things-that-go-bump-in-the-night. Stephen King had marked my transition away from the D&D-inspired fantasy I had been reading for most of my life and into something more "adult" and grounded in a world that at least superficially resembled our own, but his stuff was still fundamentally operating in the relative safety of a speculative ghosts-and-goblins-based universe.
These films were something else. They were grubby. They were hard. They were stark and unflinching. And they felt real. "Taxi Driver" most of all. It wasn't my favorite discovery of this time period (that would be "Apocalypse Now," and there will be more on that one in a later entry), but it was the one that I identified with the most. It operated 100 percent on my wavelength and spoke quite directly to the horror fan in me — Travis Bickle is an utterly terrifying creation — but it came at it in a different way and gave me some new tools through which to approach my own imagination.
I was also just starting to discover punk rock around this time, and there was something about the nasty, don't-give-a-fuck energy to this film that excited me on a purely primal level. When Scorsese himself appears and delivers his infamous monologue, I was in. I found everything about the scene utterly reprehensible and profoundly upsetting, and yet it awoke something dark and carnivorous in me that had been nestled there for a long time and that I had no way to fully comprehend or express. Now I think I get it, at least a little bit. We all have "wrong thoughts," things that we know are wrong and that we understand society requires us to surpress. And yet, here's a guy just saying it, damn the consequences. The monologue is an anarchic expression of reptilian id, and Scorsese (and screenwriter Paul Schrader) simply don't give a fuck what you think about it. They're not only inviting your disapproval, they're reveling in it.
As an adult who has spent the greater portion of my life studying film, I can now discern intellectually what it is that I find so frightening about that scene (and, indeed, the entire movie), and it's not the monologue itself. Rather, it's the inscrutability of Robert DeNiro's silent reaction to it. He's not blank — we can see that he is reacting (he adjusts the mirror to get a better look at Scorsese, his mouth twitches, etc.) but we can't quite figure out what he's thinking. Is he disgusted? Is he aroused? We simply don't know. And Scorsese cuts viciously away before we come anywhere near an answer.
This isn't a movie about answers. Fuck answers, Scorsese and Schrader are saying, you don't deserve them and we're not giving them.
The realization that you could do that simply blew my mind.
There's a berzerker bravery to this film that is nearly unmatched in American cinema, and to fifteen-year-old me, that bravery — that willingness to simply not give a fuck — was like a clap of thunder in my head. I realized that it's easy to simply "scare" people. Creaky footsteps in a dark room will do it every time. A cat jumping out of a closet (accompanied by the appropriate "sting" on the soundtrack) will always work. One and done, moving on.
But to truly disturb someone — to crawl up into their skin uninvited and make them think and feel things they know they shouldn't be thinking or feeling — is a profound act. It's almost religious in its power.
I still love horror, and Stephen King will always be my literary security blanket.
But "Taxi Driver" opened me up to all sorts of possibilities I hadn't even glimpsed before.
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