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Taxi Driver: The Myth of the Magic
A few thoughts on my first viewing of this classic film.
I used to fancy myself a film buff. At my most ‘prolific’ I attended the cinema 26 times in one year (sadly, that year was 1999 and half of those trips were to see The Phantom Menace). Yes, I thought I was a sophisticate. I’d talk about movies all the time, share obscure trivia, learn useless information about the worlds created within the fictional narrative, play variations of hierarchy games to demonstrate my ‘intellectual’ clout…but when it came time to take seriously the passion I’d developed as a fan and explore how to become a filmmaker, seemingly the magic died. And I’m pretty sure the magic died because the reality of a thing is harder to take than the myth of a thing. And the reality was that I wasn’t capable of generating the same magic as a filmmaker to the same degree as I was absorbing it as a fan of films. Once the magic had died and I could no longer ignore the reality of a thing, I began a long process of analyzing life behind the veil of the manufactured zeitgeist, and what I found was largely unglamorous; a gritty, undesirable contrast to the fantasies we use to distract ourselves in everyday life.
Throughout my naive pursuit of film, I was always vaguely aware of a ’70s film called Taxi Driver that was almost universally touted as a classic of…
