E168 | Thinking Films: Taxi Driver (1976) w/ Tom Shkolnik

Today Alex and special guest Tom Shkolnik discuss the 1976 film Taxi Driver directed by Marin Scorcese and starring Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster. 

Tom is the director of the 2012 British drama The Comedian nominated for Best Newcomer at the 2012 London film festival. He is the director of an upcoming documentary A Life of One's Own about psychoanalyst Marion Milner. 

In this episode we discuss Scorcese and his filmmaking style, why Taxi Driver remains relevant today, the appeal of this film to young men, the schizoid personality type, the danger of the Drama triangle, as well as themes of loneliness, trauma and alienation. 

Interviewed by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Alex is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.

Check out The Thinking Mind Blog on Substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-186445029

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Alex is not currently taking on new psychotherapy clients, if you are interested in working with Alex for focused behaviour change coaching , you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Coaching" in the subject line.

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Transcript

Speaker 5: [00:00:00] You talking to me? 

Speaker 6: That taxi driver's been staring at us. 

Speaker 5: You talking to me? I don't 

Speaker 7: know if it's weird or you or me. 

Speaker 5: You talking to me. Well, I'm the only one here. 

Speaker 6: I don't believe I've ever met anyone quite like you. 

Speaker 5: Oh yeah. 

Speaker 7: You'll never see a more chilling performance. Then this Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese's, taxi Driver.

Speaker 8: Welcome back. Today we are doing our once a month Thinking Films episode. We've discussed a few films on the podcast in the past few months. Today we're discussing Taxi Driver, which came out in 1976. It's of course the 50 year anniversary. Taxi Driver is the oldest film we've discussed so far, directed by Martin Scorsese, of course, and starring Robert De Niro most of the time.

As you guys know, I do these film episodes. By myself sitting in a room. [00:01:00] But in real life, that's not how I like to talk about films. I like to talk about them with people. Today I actually get to talk about the film with a film director. I'm, uh, delighted to be joined by Tom. Thanks so much for joining me.

Speaker 9: It's my pleasure. Alex, 

Speaker 8: taxi driver. Uh, it's grimy, it's hypnotic. It's about isolation, rumination, humiliation, a moral crusade. I asked you, you know, what kind of film might you want to discuss on the podcast, and you provided a list and this was one of them. What, what draws you to this film? 

Speaker 9: I, it's a big question.

I, I, my relationship to the film has changed. Can I ask one question before you? Why humiliation? 

Speaker 8: So, we'll, we'll get into it, but I think that a lot, like my dominant emotion watching Robert De Niro in this film is sadness. 

Speaker 9: Hmm. 

Speaker 8: And I don't know if that's everyone's reaction, but that's my reaction. And I think partly informed by my work as a [00:02:00] therapist and a psychiatrist.

And I think humiliation is something people talk about male aggression a lot. The, the Netflix show adolescence came out last year, and that's basically about the dangers of male aggression. We don't talk enough about what, in my view, is the most important antecedent to, to male aggression, which is humiliation.

So always the case. But very often when men feel humiliated and hard done by, that is the one of the main triggers for aggression violence. That that's of course not a justification, but definitely an important risk factor, I think, to understand. 

Speaker 9: Yeah, 

Speaker 8: and I think you do see that with this character. 

Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

It's just, it was an interesting, uh, like word. It's such a powerful, it obviously affected me. Um, maybe it's part of my love for the film. I think the, I think for me taxi driver is like a gateway drug [00:03:00] into cinema for many pe many, maybe particularly young men. I think, you know, maybe it was the film, I can't specifically pinpoint this, but I think it was probably the film that took me from loving, you know, action movies or, or, or into something that was akin to that.

It, it is a kind of thriller and a kind of action movie, but it has this other quality to it. It has a kind of existential edge. It has a kind of, uh, um, artisticness to it that suddenly opened the door to, to the possibility of films being other things than just. Vehicles of entertainment, which they kind of, you know, from sort of Terminator to Yeah.

And it's like, it's one of those movies that I think for many people certainly my age, was the kind of transition where suddenly you discovered Travis Bickle, um, and the world of, of Scorsese and Schrader. [00:04:00] 

Speaker 8: How old were you when you first watched this film? 

Speaker 9: I don't have a particular memory. I must have seen it on VHS, uh, in my early teens.

Um, and I think there was something about the vision of New York in the seventies that put a spell on me. I think as a young person, obviously the character of Travis, I think for many years I walked around with a sort of battered army jacket in, in, in a kind of Travis Bick oldness. But there's something about the way that taxi glides through the streets of New York, and I think New York in that time.

Has always ha uh, held a kind of spell on my imagination as, as I think if I think I, I think I always think that I was born in the wrong time and I think a part of me thinks that I belong in New York in the seventies. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. And I, we have to talk about this, um, part in it's historical context. So the mid seventies, [00:05:00] there's a documentary that just came out on Netflix about what 1975 was like for cinema, and I would definitely recommend people go watch that.

Taxi Driver obviously is one of the films mentioned the mid seventies are of course this time in US history where there's a lot of meant, you've got the aftermath of the counterculture, you've got economic problems, you've got the whole Nixon, all the Nixon Watergate stuff. And so films were coming out, uh, at this time, which are very much like reflecting this, this collapse of grand narratives, you know, that were really helping people up until that point.

Speaker 9: Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, I think that's part of it. And I think the other part that taxi duty driver is in a, in a string of, I dunno if you've read, uh, there's a great book called Easy Riders Raging Bulls. 

Speaker 8: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 9: About this moment in American cinema where up to the late sixties American cinema was ruled by the studio system that kind of [00:06:00] told people what kind of films to make.

And then in this moment of turmoil and counterculture and everything that you're describing, um, this film, easy Rider came out and became a massive hit. And film studios were in a rush to suddenly give young filmmakers money to make films that they hoped would reach this audience that they didn't know how to talk to.

And taxi driver is very much in that wave of American cinema, which to, to this day remains like a treasure trove. I mean, the amount of incredible personal films, there is no way on God's Green Earth that taxi driver would be made today. Never. 

Speaker 8: Why? Why not? 

Speaker 9: I think the main character is too unlikable. Um, I think there is something about a kind of nihilism to [00:07:00] it, or, or, or, um, there's a real darkness to that film that, again, maybe as a horror film it could function, but I think as a character study on that level of a kind of anti-hero, um, I I 

Speaker 8: difficult to market 

Speaker 9: what's 

Speaker 8: the marketing strategy?

Speaker 9: Yeah. Difficult to market. And, and, and also, um, I. I think it's a film that I think films nowadays are put through a prism of a kind of morality. They have to have certain, uh, maybe even performative type of morality. And I think taxi driver exists outside of that in a way that makes it a very uncomfortable viewing.

Speaker 8: Yeah. I, I was watching, so I, I was watching it a couple of days ago with a friend, and this film has a lot of racism. It has, uh, exploitation, sexual exploitation of underage women, et cetera. And the [00:08:00] friend, uh, I was watching it with was clearly like, oh, this is a bit like, how could you, is it okay to make a film like that?

And I'm thinking the film is showing bad things that happen in real life, but the fact that it's showing them is not an endorsement of those things. 

Speaker 9: But it's a good question. 

Speaker 8: Well, I mean, that's, that would be my, I guess that would be my position is that the, the film isn't an endorsement of these terrible things, but it's showing, you know, this does happen in real life, which it does as we're all finding out through various emails from Jeffrey Epstein.

Um, but I think nowadays in cinema, the ethos is more like if you're showing it on screen, it is on some level an endorsement. 

Speaker 9: Yes. I think, I think it's a contradiction in all of Scorsese's work where he seduces us into these worlds, but he's also critical of these worlds. And so all of his films have that knife's edge of, of, of sort of moral ambiguity and, and you [00:09:00] have to face up to them and, and make your decisions and, and, and decide whether you believe in him.

As a filmmaker, I tend to believe in him. I tend to think that he does have a very strong moral compass. Um. Particularly in a film like Taxi Driver that's so rooted in the character's subjectivity. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: To not make him how he is, to not make him a racist, for example, would be a lie. That is who he is, you know, for better 

Speaker 8: or worse, that's 

Speaker 9: who 

Speaker 8: he is.

Speaker 9: And, and the, the fact that the, the film shows a character who has, uh, a level of racism to him is not, I don't think it's a, a statement that the film is racist. I think it's a film about someone who is like that. Yeah. And, and as you said, lots of people walk around, um, with lots of opinions and, and, and [00:10:00] viewpoints about the world.

And, and maybe part of the problem that we're experiencing is a culture at the moment is that we're too frightened of looking at our own shadows. Um. And so our shadows become malignant, um, through purveyors of shadows. 

Speaker 8: And, and that that's what what I like about Scorsese's films is a lot of his films will show you how seductive a dark way of living is.

And so for me, like Goodfellas comes to mind, all the Wolf of Wall Street, which we also talked about a couple of months ago. It's gonna take you on the ride and show you the pleasure of like, oh, look at this amazing, expedient, luxurious, glamorous way of living you can achieve if you are willing to be dishonest, if you're willing to steal, if you're willing to use violence and you feel the pleasure of it.

But then it also shows you the inevitable downfall. You have the meteoric rise and then the destruction. And that's why for me, ultimately [00:11:00] it, um, a lot of bros will watch Wolf of Wall Street and take the wrong message from it. But if you really watch a film like that, or a film like Goodfellas or Casino.

Even Raging Bull, you can actually come away with a lot of useful lessons in my view about morality. And I, I watched, um, the, the Apple documentary about Scorsese, and you can see why he developed the sensibility because he literally grew up on the streets of New York, surrounded by the mafia on one side and clerics and Catholics and priests on the other.

So he, in a weird way, his films embody this like, um, duality 

Speaker 9: for sure. And I think, again, I don't know Scorsese, I don't, you know, I've never met him, but I think he also lives, they say in the TV show, so I don't think it's like a radical statement to make, like he lives between a priest and a, and a, and a gangster.

Like, like yeah. He, he, he [00:12:00] has both of those things in him, and I think his films are imbued with that. And, and maybe that's partly why they are popular. There is a popular quality to, to them. Um, 

Speaker 8: they're accessible. 

Speaker 9: They're accessible. There's, and, and as soon as you make that world accessible, you, you, you are inner kind of moral quagmire.

But if he didn't make it accessible, who would watch it? Do you know what I mean? 

Speaker 8: Who would watch it? But also it's true that like the, the dark things that he's putting on film are like actually seductive. People engage in violence for a reason. They do drugs for a reason that is not justifying any of those things.

All of those things lead to very bad places. Um, but if they weren't appealing on some level, to some people, they wouldn't happen. And that's, you know, this is the dark territory we're in with taxi driver. 

Speaker 9: It is. And [00:13:00] again, that's why I think, I think nowadays. If a film like that would even, you know, get to being made.

I think it was, it was sort of a miracle that it was made at the time. It was only because De Niro I think wanted to get, make, make it and he was kind of quite getting quite famous. But I think now you would need to signal much more to the audience that you are not aligned with the character. 

Speaker 7: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: And I think it would've made for a much less interesting film because I think what he does is he takes you into the mind of the character, into his alienation.

And that is a place that is very frightening. But also for some of us, very familiar, certainly when we're young, I think 

Speaker 8: lots of young, oh, this is a process. Typical, you know, young male movie. 

Speaker 9: Yes. It, it really is. And it was interesting for me to watch it again now in my ripe old age and to see how my dialogue with Travis is changing and my dialogue with the [00:14:00] film is changing.

Um, because I do remember as a young person, maybe as a young man, feeling like it was like someone had taken the inside of my mind, not, not that I was ever racist, I don't think, but certainly in the feeling of alienation. 

Speaker 8: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 9: And loneliness. Mm-hmm. And this feeling of drifting through the world is such a famili familiar feeling and not knowing how to be someone in the world, uh, and feeling kind of helpless and feeling the humiliation and the rage of that Travis takes it to somewhere very violent that I didn't feel compelled to do, but I definitely understand it.

Speaker 8: And some men do, you know, some men have that. Um, you sent me an article about this film where they interviewed Paul Schrader, who wrote this film. Couple of fascinating pieces of information from that article. Firstly, as [00:15:00] you say. After the film came out, some random guy broke into Paul Schrader's office and found him and said, Hey, like, how do you know about me?

You wrote this film, taxi Driver. How did you know about me? And Paul was like, there's a lot of you. There's way more of you actually than you know. The other thing is Paul Schrader apparently wrote this as a form of kind of self therapy. So he writes, before this film was written, I lost my job. I left my wife, I left a girl who I left my wife for.

I didn't have a place to live. I was drinking considerably. I was living in my car and I had a gun in the car. And this went on for a couple of weeks. And then he goes on to say that he wrote this film to exercise this character. 

Speaker 9: It's, it is fascinating. He also says that he suddenly, that it started where he suddenly had this image of a, a taxi cab as a kind of moving coffin that's moving through the, the world.

Which it's funny, even just talking about it now, us talking about it, I feel like we're close to something. [00:16:00] That is like repulsive. Like I, I'm talking about it and part of me goes, I don't want, I don't want to look at this. I don't want to go there. You know, even in, in conversation. Mm-hmm. And there was something about that moment in cultural history that enabled that film to exist.

And there's something about this line between Schrader, Scorsese and De Niro who were all, for whatever reason, feeling something of this, of, of this sort of underground man. Um, I think for me it always connect, it always connects to Joseph Roth. There's a novel by Joseph Roth called, uh, flight Without End About, uh, a soldier who, who's making his way back from the, from the front in Russia.

And he makes this long, long journey back home. And at one point he stops in this city in the hope that his brother lives there, and he hopes that his brother will give him some money for the journey back. And his brother [00:17:00] refuses to help him. I can't remember why, but he says something along the lines of, um, a man without money in a big city is like a ghost.

Speaker 6: Hmm. 

Speaker 9: And there's something about Travis, he's like a ghost. He's not fully there. And he tries to reanimate himself through Betsy, through this attempt to have a relationship with Betsy. And then when that doesn't work, and she rejects him, which is an incredibly fascinating, bizarre sequence where he takes it to the porn cinema and then when it doesn't work, when he can't fulfill the fantasy of the kind of all American dream with the all American girl.

Speaker 8: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 9: He decides to kill the presidential candidate. Do you know what I mean? 

Speaker 8: That's the next can be. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. He just oscillates to the other extreme. And then when that doesn't work, he decides to become a vigilante. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: And save this young girl and get her to kind of go back home. So again, he, he creates a kind of another [00:18:00] mutation of some kind of all American dream of picket fences and, and do you know what I mean?

Like some kind of idyllic dream of, of, of life 

Speaker 8: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: That eludes him and, and it, it ends with this ex extraordinarily brutal, uh, act of carnage. 

Speaker 8: What film would you pair this film with for a double feature? 

Speaker 9: I thought about this a lot 'cause you told me this question in advance. 

Speaker 8: Do you like, do you like it as a question?

Speaker 9: It's a good question. I think the, the, I had two main ideas and they're both Scorsese films. 

Speaker 8: Okay. 

Speaker 9: Um, I think the first film that you have to pair it with is King of Comedy. Because in a way, king of Comedy is almost like you could say that through the Scorsese De Niro collaborations, they basically keep coming back to the underground man.

And the way [00:19:00] their lives are changing is changing in the films and tech and, and King of Comedy, I can't remember if it comes after Raging Bull or before Raging Bull. 

Speaker 8: It's, uh, I think it's after. 'cause I think King of Comedy is 1982 from what I have here, and I think Raging Bull was 80. 

Speaker 9: Okay. So it's the one after.

And King of Comedy in a sense. Rupert Pupkin is like Travis Bickel, but instead of wanting to kill the president, he wants to be famous as a comedian, but he's not funny and he's not connected, and he also doesn't want to go through the journey of doing the clubs. He somehow feels that he deserves, he's 

Speaker 8: entitled.

Speaker 9: Yeah. And so he abducts Jerry Lewis, Jerry, the host of this, this TV show, and as, as a way of forcing them. And, and what in, in Taxi Driver is a kind of violent rage [00:20:00] in King of Comedy becomes this like seething hostility. And, and so it's, it's, it's, again, it's a kind of oddly funny film, but it, there's sort of twin characters, Rupert Popkin and Travis Bickle.

Um, there's a kind of transformation between them. And another thing, another film I thought of, which is the next, in the nineties, Scorsese and Schrader made another film called Bringing Out the Dead. 

Speaker 8: Mm. 

Speaker 9: And in a sense, that's like the mirror image of Taxi Driver, because if Travis is moving through this city in a cab full of rage and resentment.

Um, Nicholas Cage's character and bringing out the Dead is moving through New York in the nineties in a, in an ambulance trying to save people and haunted by the fact that he can't save them all. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: And so I think there's something about Scorsese's spiritual journey that's [00:21:00] kind of constantly evolving in his films.

And this is something about the line between these three films that I thought could be an interesting, if someone wanted to, to, to follow his spiritual trajectory, uh, in movies. 

Speaker 8: Doing these film episodes has made me realize how many films I still need to watch, all the great Directors, because I, you know, in the past I was like, oh, Scorsese, yeah, I've watched Wolf of War Street.

I've watched good photos, I've watched Casino, but it's, I haven't watched either of these films and I need to go back and watch them. 

Speaker 9: Were they considered lesser films? Mm. And, but I love lesser films. I I'm obsessed with lesser films. 'cause 'cause often lesser films. Lesser films are the films I just did.

Air quotes. Uh, they're more 

Speaker 8: experimental. 

Speaker 9: They're more, they're, they're more experimental. And they're also, there are moment where ideas are ripening. Uh, there's a search in them or there's the end of something in them. Um, in King of Comedy, I think he was [00:22:00] confronting, I think he even says it in the TV show.

He was confronting something about himself and his own, uh, compulsion to fame Mm. That he struggled with. 

Speaker 8: Did the Scorsese 

Speaker 9: was, yeah. 

Speaker 8: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 9: And, and you really feel it in the film. There's a sort of uneasiness to it. And I think with something like bringing out the Dead, he was very influenced by Buddhism.

So he, he was really interested in reincarnation and. Karma and all kinds of questions to do with Buddhism. And they're so in the film, I mean, I, the, the pinnacle of the film is, is an extraordinary scene. Do you want me to tell you the scene? 

Speaker 8: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: It's an extraordinary scene. So basically at the beginning of the film, uh, the character gets called to this house where a man has had a heart attack and he goes into cardiac arrest and they take him to hospital.

And the, the paramedics character, Nicholas Cage, he, he sort of starts having feelings towards the man's daughter. And the d the man is kind of dead. [00:23:00] He's clin, you know, his brain dead, but they keeping his body alive. They keep jolting him and Nicholas Cage's character becomes convinced that he can hear the man's voice that he's speaking to him and he's saying to him, please let me go.

They won't let me go. And towards the end of the film, there's this incredible scene where Nicholas Cage takes all the senses or electrodes from this dying man puts them on his own. Body and takes the air oxygen and puts it in his mouth and he starts breathing for the man so that the alarms don't go off.

Speaker 8: Oh, wow. 

Speaker 9: So that they don't come and cha, you know, uh, give him the electric thing again and you just see him breathing and he breathes in and out and you can see the light dim on the dying man. And there's this feeling of like that in letting him go, he's bringing life back into himself. 

Speaker 6: Mm. 

Speaker 9: He's, he's re animating himself [00:24:00] and it's, it's, again, it's such a spiritual film in the heart of a kind of g grimness.

Yeah. Um, and, and, and so it's a kind of funny compliment and it was written by Schrader, so it's a, it's sort of, 

Speaker 8: yeah. 

Speaker 9: There's a kind of, it's a 

Speaker 8: mirror image 

Speaker 9: in a, it's a mirror image of taxi driver in a way. So I'd recommend those two, 

Speaker 8: the films I had, uh, so one that I think. Kind of not mimics but compliments It is similar to it.

And the archetype is, I guess, joker from 2019. Todd Phillips movie. Most people are aware of untreated mental illness, loneliness, again, public humiliation leading to vigilantism kind of naturally. No, not even that, just vi violence. And obviously there's like echoes of King of Comedy in Joker because 

Speaker 9: a hundred 

Speaker 8: percent he, he kills a comedian, played by, by Robert De Niro.

He's actually weird connections here. And then the other film I had, which is, which I would more pair it as a contrast, is American Psycho from 2000 [00:25:00] starring Christian Bale. And he, this is about a lone man wandering the streets of New York, but he's very rich and very powerful. And you might look at them and even though they're different socioeconomically, you might say, well, they're both like psychopathic maybe.

But no they're not. 'cause you know, Christian Bale from this film is quite psychopathic. 

Speaker 9: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 8: But Robert De Niro and Taxi driver is not, 

Speaker 9: you wouldn't call him a psychopath. 

Speaker 8: Absolutely not. We'll talk about this maybe when we talk about the firm itself, but he's a sensitive person. He cares about people and he wants to do good things in the world, very non psychopathic traits.

Whereas Christian Baal also says he's not there, but he's not, he doesn't want good for anyone. He doesn't really empathize with anyone. He's mostly just pursuing power and control and authority, and that's his route to violence. Yes. So I saw that as like a really nice contrast. 

Speaker 9: Yeah, [00:26:00] for sure. I think it's, it's true.

There is, there is, um, there is a pain to Travis and, and also, you know, I mentioned the Joseph Roth novel. I think one of the things that's not really talked about a lot in when people talk about Taxi driver is, is that Travis is a, is a is a XGI. He had ju he has come back from Vietnam and it's only mentioned in the first scene of the film when he goes to the taxi place.

Speaker 8: Yeah. And he's wearing the jacket a lot. 

Speaker 9: He's wearing the jacket a lot throughout the film, but it's never kind of spoken about again, that he's traumatized, that he's an ex soldier who, who, who was taught to fight and was taught how to kill and then was thrown back into society without knowing, um, what to do with himself.

No one, um, explained to him how to become a person again. Uh, and [00:27:00] some people are more vulnerable to this than others, and he's clearly like really, really vulnerable. Like he says, he can't sleep, he starts driving the cab because he can't sleep. Um, and there's something very militant about the answers that he gives when he decides to suddenly he has a mission and the mission is to kill.

And it galvanizes him, and he starts doing the pushups and he starts, and he becomes a soldier again. That's his way of, 

Speaker 8: that's his way of, of coping and giving, giving himself, giving himself a mission, giving himself a target to work towards. 

Speaker 9: Yeah, and I think it's something that, that society always struggles to, to, to, I thought of it when I, when I, when I watched Ken Burns', um, series about Vietnam, and I just remember suddenly being overwhelmed with like a flood of tears because I just thought of all these young people, American and Vietnamese, [00:28:00] who were flung into this nightmare, and some of them didn't make it, and some of them did make it, and then they came home and no one wants to talk about what we do with these people that we've trained to kill.

Yeah. And we've put in the most horrendous situations and then we put them back home and we go, and now stop. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: And don't do that anymore. Yeah. And now just be a normal person. And many people can, and many people can't. Yeah. And Travis is someone who, who can't, he can't do it. He doesn't know how to find his way back.

Speaker 8: And that's why I feel so sad watching it, because again, he's not psychopathic. He wants the things that everyone wants. Uh, he wants connection, he wants to contribute, he wants to feel significant. We all can relate to this. He just doesn't know how to get them. We talk about that in a second when we talk about the plot.

In terms of how this film did, it was pretty like well recognized at the [00:29:00] time. So it was, I think, quite controversial in the sense a lot of people were like, wow, what, what the hell is this film? Some people walked out of the the Can Film Festival where it was. Screened. I think Tennessee Williams didn't like, hated it, but I won the Palm Door, got four Oscar nominations.

Financially it turned 28 million against like a very small, small budget. So it sounds like it was well recognized pretty much straight away. 

Speaker 9: No, it was, it was a, I think it was very successful straight away. I think that a big problem happened when, um, I can't remember the name of the man, but a year or two after someone tried to assassinate Reagan and 

Speaker 8: John Hinkley.

Speaker 9: Hinkley, yeah. And he said that he was doing it, um, for Jodi Foster. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: So there was something about, and I think there is something about, again, it's funny we talked about moralizing and art, but I think [00:30:00] a film can touch darkness in a way. I think that film has something dangerous about, it 

Speaker 8: can be as, uh, contagious 

Speaker 9: a little bit.

There's something about that film that you, you, you have to respect it, but you also have to be careful. There are other films like that, like Clockwork Orange and films that touch on these parts of the psyche in a way that's very seductive. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. And you know, I'm, I'm kind of contradicting what I said earlier, but Yes, because you can watch these films and you can misinterpret them, I guess.

Speaker 9: Yeah. And then it's a question whether it's about filmmakers to make films that are beyond being misinterpreted. And I, I don't think that, but I am just mindful that when you. When you touch on darkness, you open a door to all kinds of things. And John Hinkley clearly was, was, you know, maybe John Hinckley would've found another reason to do what he did.

Do you [00:31:00] know what I mean? Yeah. And he, he clung onto that. But, but when, as soon as you're in that realm, you, you are in dialogue with those things. 

Speaker 8: And again, I think the film in Scorsese's catalog, which is most relevant in this respect, is actually Wolf of Wall Street right now because it's not talking about like ultra violence, it's just talking about, um, making money through dishonest means 

Speaker 9: ultra greed.

Speaker 8: And I think a man in his early twenties can watch the first two thirds of that film, ignore the last half hour, 45 minutes and be, I'm, I'm, I'm sure, I'm glad w of Wall Street is made and I think it should be allowed to be made, but I'm sure a lot of young men have watched that film. And the message they, I've gotten from it is, I'm gonna go out and make as much man money as I can, as expediently as I can.

Yeah. And date hot women, and that's what my life is gonna be about. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. And that's 

Speaker 8: because it's so effective in how it lures you in. 

Speaker 9: It's so effective. And, and that's the moral ambiguity of [00:32:00] Scorsese's cinema. Like that is, that's him, you know, not all of his films, obviously he has his, his his more overt spiritual films, but in these types of movies.

Yeah. He, and it's, it's both courageous and manipulative and it's tricky. You have to be in dialogue with that, you know, because for me, at least, you do align yourself with Travis. As I watch that film, I do align and, and maybe only now when I'm much older than Travis as a character, I watch him and I feel sorry for him, you know?

And I find myself. I really drawn to like the, the scene with Wizard, you know, this other cab driver who he sees as a sort of role model, or is this kind of what he calls him Wizard. So it's like this kind of source of wisdom 

Speaker 8: and he is like the least wise, 

Speaker 9: he's like the least wise 

Speaker 8: you could imagine. 

Speaker 9: But, but he sort of tells him, he says to him, you know, I've got these thoughts, I've got these bad thoughts, and Wizard just [00:33:00] doesn't know what to do.

And he says, you know, there's life. Some guy is, you know, he basically tries to say to him, life is hard and get on with it. Get on with it and make the best of it. But no one knows how to, 

Speaker 8: how to contain him. 

Speaker 9: No. How to hear him. And again, with Betsy, when he takes her to the porn cinema on their date, it's so off the mark.

Yeah. 

Speaker 8: Let, let's actually just go through the plot. Okay. For the sake of completion, just for those who haven't watched or haven't watched in a while. So this, so this film obviously senses around Travis Bickel, 26-year-old Vietnam veteran, chronically, uh, insomniac. Working nights as a taxi driver. He's isolated and he's, he projects everything outwards.

So he's incr in increasingly disgusted by the cities, what he calls filth. And the film is really narrated with voiceover through his diary where his thoughts are on a loop, talking about how bad everything is going, he becomes infatuated with Betsy. So she's a campaign [00:34:00] worker for a guy named Senator Palatine who's running for president, and he marches into where she's working and asks her out on a date.

And she's actually quite seduced by him in the beginning, which is one, one of the really interesting things I saw on the rewatch. But then after our first date, for a second date, Travis takes her to a porn theater, which is the stark. Thing, like why would someone do that? And you're, you're sort of starting to realize how uncalibrated Travis is as a person.

He has no, I, he's doing it innocently. He thinks what's wrong with taking someone to of test her? Lots 

Speaker 9: of couples do this. 

Speaker 8: Lots of couples do this, and she's obviously horrified. The relationship collapses. And then Travis spirals, uh, he buys guns, he trains physically trains with his guns as well. And then he goes into this like cleanup fantasy fest.

He plots to assassinate Senator Palatine. Um, but he fails to do that. And then after that, he goes on a [00:35:00] crusade. He finds this young, uh, 12-year-old prostitute named Iris, played by Jodi Foster. And he tries to save her, but she doesn't really want to live that, leave that life. And he ends up violently attacking the brothel and killing all the men around her.

Now the, in the last part of the film, he's said to have survived and there are newspaper articles written about how he's a hero and the family of Jodi Foster have gotten her back in, in their lives and he's been congratulated. And I think there's some ambiguity about whether that's reality or not. Hmm.

Or whether that's kind of his dream as he's dying. Do you have, do you have strong thoughts on that, on that ending? 

Speaker 9: I think for me it is a reality because, because the very last shot of the film is this sort of paranoid sequence where Scorsese sort of suggests that maybe the whole loop is just starting all over again.

And, and so I think, I think it is real, and I think it's also a [00:36:00] kind of, again, when you connect it to the king of comedy, it's, it's a sort of critique of America's fascination with violence that, that the way. A crim, a violent criminal can be reframed as a kind of hero. Uh, and the, and, and, and our hunger, a kind of tabloid hunger for stories of like the vigilante who saved 

Speaker 8: mm-hmm.

Speaker 9: The innocent girl and brought her back into the arms of her parents, um, can sort of grab hold, which is, which is exactly what happens in the King of Comedy, in the King of Comedy again. He, he, at the end, he celebrated. 

Speaker 8: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 9: And it's a very morally ambiguous critique of a society that, that seems quite comfortable with certain types of violence.

Uh, for some reason. Another film that came to mind that I thought maybe people would be interested in, or as you were talking is Diary of a Country Priest, the SSON [00:37:00] film, which is, um, a French film from the fifties that. About a priest that is, is struggling with his faith, and Schrader is a big, big, big, uh, fan of Bresson.

And the, the, the device of this obsessive diary writing and the kind of inner voice of the diary is very much from, uh, diary of a Country priest. But there it's about a priest who's struggling with his faith. And here it's about a taxi driver who's struggling with, I don't know, his faith too, in a way.

Speaker 8: His, he's struggling with what I, what's his place in the world, and I think the diary entries, like, I, I really recommend journaling to help with mental health, but it's important to have a sense of like what techniques you might use when you're journaling. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. 

Speaker 8: The problem with, one of the things I think this film gets right psychologically is that the dangers of like projection and externalization, so when people are unhappy [00:38:00] with themselves or they're not getting their needs met.

They have this tendency to just point that outwards and be like, what's wrong in the world? And that's what you see in Travis' diary, diary entries. They're all just about the filth of the city and everything's going bad. And there's a lot of racist language in that and a lot of moral adjudicating. There is nothing in his diary about who am I?

Like, what do I need? Uh, what are the problems I'm facing? And so if nothing else, the one of the key takeaways for me for this film psychologically, is when people are on a happy day project and that projection becomes like a self-reinforcing thing. The more you meditate on how bad the world is, the, the more focus goes off yourself.

Um, and you end up in a negative feedback loop. Well, a positive feedback loop that's very negative. 

Speaker 9: But it's funny, the question of projection in the film, like. [00:39:00] Because obviously the most famous scene in that film is the improvised, are you talking to me? 

Speaker 8: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 9: Which, which is, which is De Niro like in the script it just says he speaks to himself in the mirror.

Mm-hmm. That's all it says. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. Yeah. 

Speaker 9: And then De Niro improvised this thing of like, are you talking to me? Are you talking, you know, and, and this persecuting voice that he imagines in the mirror, uh, that he feels a need to stand up to. Yes. And, um, threaten and, and overwhelm and, and also this thing of like projection.

'cause like you said, there is the kind of dark projections of like filth and racism and all of that stuff. But there's also the projection onto Betsy, 

Speaker 8: that she's an angel. 

Speaker 9: She's an angel. And the projection onto Foster's character, this innocent young girl that's been defiled by this reality that he needs to save [00:40:00] and that maybe if he saves her, he will save his own innocence or something.

Yes. You know, the place in him that's beyond filth, he could rescue all of it and and he goes to extreme length to to, to try and save it even though she doesn't want him to save her. Yeah. She doesn't, she actively doesn't want him to do it. 

Speaker 8: That one of the things I was gonna mention about this film was the drama triangle.

Is that something that you're familiar with as well? So the Drama Triangle is a really nice piece of theory from, um, transaction analysis. This kind of psychotherapy invented by a guy called Eric Byrne and one of Ben's students named Eric Kaufman. Um, came up with the drama triangle and he, he basically says, when people go into a dysfunctional place, psychologically, they tend to oscillate between three positions.

Speaker 5: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 8: The rescuer, the victim, and the persecutor. And most people, I've heard of this in some form, this concept. That's what you see with Travis. [00:41:00] So, and sometimes he's a victim when he says, I'm God's lonely man, and the loneliness is unbearable. It's like, yes, it's true. He's lonely, but he's also disowning his power in some sense.

It's like, I'm lonely and it's kind of inevitable, and I'm destined to be lonely. He projects a rescuer into Betsy. She's an angel, and she can like save me, and I think he actually uses that language at some point. He becomes a rescuer when he's interacting with Betsy. The way he interacts, Sam talks to her is like, I can save you from the situation.

He says, your other male coworker. He seems really annoying and he seems like he's bothering you and I can save you from, 

Speaker 9: but he also says to her, you're not a happy person 

Speaker 8: and you're not a happy person. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. 

Speaker 8: And then obviously the same with Iris, the, the prostitutes where he says, you know, I can save you, even though she doesn't particularly want to be saved.

And all of these positions, victim, rescuer, persecuted, they're an attempt to meet these needs. If I can be a victim, it makes me like [00:42:00] significant. It gives me a sense of like meaning and how to understand the world, but also, you know, rescuer. And then of course he becomes the persecutor, becomes the judge, jury, and executioner, and he kills all the men in the brothel.

Um, so I thought that was a really nice illustration. Obviously for the average person listening, it's not gonna be that you're gonna be at these extremes of behavior, but it's worth, worth understanding. When you're feeling a little bit, uh, shaken, are you going to any of these positions? Are you self-sacrificing for others?

Are you sort of tyrannical directing your anger out at others? Or are you like, disowning your power and having a victim mindset? 

Speaker 9: I totally, uh, uh, recognize all of those. Yeah. 

Speaker 8: I've been all three of those today. 

Speaker 9: I, I've, I've been all of them while listening to you. No, it's, yeah. But I think that's the power of Travis.

I think that's, that's why that film becomes such a powerful metaphor for so [00:43:00] many. Yeah. Men, young men in particular. Like, and, and I think in the, in the piece that you mentioned about the 50th anniversary, you know, now they're called incel, you mean? 

Speaker 8: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: Like what do we do with young men who feel disenfranchised and feel like they have nothing to offer to this world?

And if we just. Despise them, someone else will say, no, I get you the 

Speaker 8: Advate of the world. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. And, and so I think what a film like Taxi Driver still does is invites us to, to be with the disenfranchised or the feeling of disenfranchisement and yeah, you could critique it and say, you know, he's still a white man and he's not a woman, and he is not, and, and, and all of those things are true.

But there's, you know, I always think of that [00:44:00] moment, which I, again, I really recognize is that moment where he's sitting watching a pop show and, and he's just, and it's in the script by the way. That's not an improvised moment. He, he, he, and, and they're dancing. There's a slow dance happening in the, in the scene and he just keeps pushing, 

Speaker 8: teetering 

Speaker 9: it, teetering on, pushing it into destruction, and then it breaks and he's so upset and he buries his head in his hands of what he's done.

I think when you feel like there is no way in for you into society mm-hmm. Into the world, into what you dream of, it can become very, very destructive. 

Speaker 8: Yes. 

Speaker 9: Because if I can't have it, why should anyone have it? And if it feels so hermetically sealed that, that there is no way in for me, I might as well burn the house down.

And, and I think we're witnessing that [00:45:00] in lots of areas of society now, this, this kind of gleeful destruction of saying, well, there's no room for me in this world that you're making, so why should I care if it doesn't burn down? 

Speaker 8: But, but almost like the sa the saddest version. The saddest thing about this is actually, I mean, firstly the in is the encapsulation of the victim position in 2026 for young men.

Because you're literally saying I'm involuntarily celibate, which means. There's nothing I can do to potentially enter a relationship with a woman, which would be not true for most people, of course. So it's, it's a victim position. But what's sad about it is that young men are mostly trapped by technology now anyway.

Mm-hmm. So you'd imagine Travis Bickle, um, nowadays would probably just be at, in his parents' basement watching TikTok. And that's, you know, good in the sense that it's less dangerous, but it's almost even sad in a sense. 

Speaker 9: Yes. It's more pacified. 

Speaker 8: It's more pacified. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. 

Speaker 8: And that's, you know, so I, [00:46:00] I think these men need to be treated with compassion and a kind of good faith challenge, as in like, let's have a conversation about what we can do to get you out in the world in a helpful way and try things, and yes, fail at them, but then also that, you know, gradually enter society.

What's so tragic about. Travis is, he does try and then he fails and then he kind of spirals. 

Speaker 9: Well, he has some 

Speaker 8: of the 

Speaker 9: tools. 

Speaker 8: Yeah, some of the tools. 

Speaker 9: He is handsome and he is charming in his own way. So like with Betsy, he can take it so far. 

Speaker 8: Yes. 

Speaker 9: Until the fact that he's unable to do this thing or that he doesn't understand something quite deeply is revealed pretty quickly.

But there's something about that moment when he walks into the Palantir thing and that first coffee that they have together, he is captivating. 

Speaker 8: [00:47:00] Absolutely. 

Speaker 9: So he has potential. He could be a person in the world, but he can't for some reason. 

Speaker 8: But he has no support. 

Speaker 9: He has no support. Something is missing.

There's a link missing that the the, it's such a painful every time. And it's also one of Scorsese's most famous shots. Because he takes her to the, to the porn cinema. And then of course, she's revolted by this and refuses to see him again. And then there's a scene where he's at a phone at a payphone and he's ringing and he's saying, did you get the flowers?

And he's trying to claw back this, this destructive act, which again, you know, I wonder if there's a, there's a, a kind of wish to defile her as well to sort of take the All American beauty and smear her with this dirtiness that he feels. But he does it. He's horrified by it. She rightly dis disconnects from him, and then he's on the phone to her, and then the camera just [00:48:00] disconnects from him and just glides to the side.

And you hear his voice and you just see an empty corridor. And the classic way of doing a scene like that would be to, uh, you know, stay on him. And not even more than that. Like, stay on him and close, close up, close up. But Scorsese disconnects us from him, and it creates, and he does it a few times in the film, like one of the very first times he leaves the taxi cab and you see him and he stretches his back and he starts walking and instead of the camera following him, the camera goes the other way and it just starts looking at this empty cab station, and then you catch him again at the end of the shot.

And so it's these moments of like disconnection, which weirdly are so him. It's as if a part of his consciousness is just breaking apart Yeah. From the moment. Like he, he 

Speaker 8: being left behind. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. He can't tolerate, he can't tolerate and he's left behind and the camera leaves him behind. [00:49:00] Really? It's o only we use the word, you know, like only a genius.

Like it's, it's, it's a, it's a camera move that's unmotivated. It has no logic to it. And yet it captures the whole film and the whole kind of moral ambiguity of the film. Breaking away from the character and enhancing his loneliness because of that. Because even, even we, I think Scorsese said that he, he felt like he couldn't even look at him in that moment, that he needed to give him his privacy because it was too painful.

But that's also kind of fascinating. That's like a part of Scorsese that's saying, I, I literally can't look at this man anymore. Yeah. Even, even I can't look. And, and I think that's, that's also Travis. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. And I think he used the word unbearable at some point. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. 

Speaker 8: In the film. See, that's why I needed to get the film directed, and I would've never come up with that.

Speaker 9: But, but, but I think that's the thing about, about, about a, any great film and certainly about Scorsese, like [00:50:00] the, you know, it's another fascinating story about this movie. Like I think it's the only movie or one of a handful that has an original score in Scorsese movies. Mostly they have. Popular music as, as a score.

And, and then he, you know, even like a string of consciousness, like one song goes into another song, into another. And, and here there's like a score that was written for the film 

Speaker 8: and it repeats 

Speaker 9: and it repeats. And it was written by Bernard Herman, who was Hitchcock's, um, regular composer. And it was actually the last thing that he wrote.

He died while they were finishing the film. And the film is dedicated to him. But there's a famous kind of anecdote, and I dunno if it's true, that when they were mixing the film, you know, often when you mix a film, the music is played alongside sound components. So if the cab is moving through the scenery, 

Speaker 8: you hear the cab, 

Speaker 9: you hear the street and the engine and the cab, and you also hear the music.

And Herman, uh, [00:51:00] pulled all the sliders down so that it would only be the music. And, and there's a famous anecdote where he said, I didn't write those horns to be played alongside traffic. And what it gives the film. Is this kind of haunting loneliness because you're very much in the world. You are in the kind of hustle and bustle of New York, and then the cab drifts through the mist and suddenly you just hear this like tune and all the sounds disappear.

And then you just hear this trumpet, this lonely trumpet, and you hear, you see closeups of, of de niro's eyes and you are inside this completely subjective experience. And then suddenly the world comes back out. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: And the film does it repeatedly again and again and again. 

Speaker 8: It gives it like a dream like atmosphere.

Speaker 9: Exactly. Or a nightmare. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. Or a nightmare. Or a nightmare. Listening to you talking earlier, I was thinking about the different kinds of masculinity that are portrayed in the film, and it's like none of, there's no [00:52:00] healthy masculinity in this film. 

Speaker 9: Maybe the guy that she works with is sort 

Speaker 8: of, I don't 

Speaker 9: think so.

I mean, he's a sleaze bag. 

Speaker 8: He, he's, um. He's civilized. Right. So he's lent all the rules of civilization. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. 

Speaker 8: But he lacks confidence and he clearly likes Betsy but can't, doesn't have the courage to approach her directly and be honest about like having romantic contentions. So that's like one version, which is obviously very common in a modern context.

The so-called nice guy archetype. Then you have De Niro who is in that moment, like when he approaches Betsy and the first date, he's able to channel that clear masculine confidence and forthrightness and self-assuredness, but then is totally socially uncalibrated. Mm. He doesn't know that you're not supposed to take a woman to a porn theater.

And obviously there's a lot going wrong with him psychologically at other levels. And then you just have men in power like senator. Palatine who, I guess you don't know a [00:53:00] huge amount of about his character, but you don't necessarily think much virtuous of him. And then you have actively really destructive men like the pimp, um, sports played by Harvey Kittel, who is just exploitative, manipulative, probably the worst kind of masculinity.

And you think if I can just take the forthrightness from the Niro and the civilization part from the other guy, you could have like a healthy Mexican. 

Speaker 9: Well, it's funny 'cause there's two other men in the film that I can think of. Okay. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: There is Wizard who's a sort of help hapless, but he he's a person.

Speaker 8: Yeah. Yeah, 

Speaker 9: that's true. He, he's a per, you know, he's a person and I think he does try and say something to, to Travis, you know, he says, you know, some guy lives, some guy dies, some guy he tries to present some, 

Speaker 8: some framework. 

Speaker 9: Framework of of, of some kind of. Paternal, he's a helpless, paternal figure. Like he doesn't really have what it takes, but he has something healthy about him.

And then there is Scorsese [00:54:00] himself in his cameo as the man who is looking to kill his, his wife, who's cheating on him. That in a way, is the spark that sends Travis into the really dark thoughts of, of guns and, and weapons and, and violence. Like that's, there's something about that scene which is so frightening and it's fascinating that that character is played by Scorsese himself.

Yeah. Like the guy who's about to go into that house because that woman up there, that's my wife, but I'm not there. And then again, this kind of racism that comes into it. 

Speaker 6: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 9: And yeah, it's a lot of very lost, dark male figures. 

Speaker 6: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: Like there isn't really anyone in the film to be. A role model and 

Speaker 8: another reason why it wouldn't get made now, 

Speaker 9: it just would not get made.

But it's, it's so powerful. And [00:55:00] again, when you connect it to the political climate that you're describing in America, this collapse of, you know, there's the great scene again, one of the metaphors in the film, you know, sport at first calls Travis Cowboy. The first time Travis comes to see, uh, Iris. And he call, he says, Hey Cowboy.

And he positions him as a copper, as, as a kind of good guy or, or establishment guy. And then the second time, uh, Travis comes to see Iris, when the, the, the attack happens, he's shaved his head into a mohawk and he refers to him as an Indian. And there's something about that. Again, again, this kind of split in American psyche between the cowboy and the Indian, between the good person who used to be our hero, but now by 1975, was not, is not, and they're [00:56:00] starting to understand that John Wayne is, is not an all good figure, but in fact a perpetrator of a genocide and then this kind of mohawk wearing Indian.

That that's, that's, that's a vigilante that's kind of taking vengeance on society and it's, it's a film that's just full of like the American psyche, like the, the really dark sides of American psyche. 

Speaker 8: The corrupt, the corrupt thing of like classic American archetypes. 

Speaker 9: Yeah, because I think, again, I'm not American and, and in a way we're all a bit American because we, because we can't escape their influence, but like.

After World War ii, I think they really believed that they were the good guys, that they had beaten the Nazis and that they were bringing good to the world. And then in the si, late sixties, you know, the assassination of Kennedy and then you know, Watergate. I dunno if that happens in around the same time, but [00:57:00] suddenly Vietnam.

And they're going, we're not the good guys. And if we're not the good guys, who are we? 

Speaker 8: There's definitely not a inevitability. To our goodness. We can't. We can no longer take our goodness for granted. No. And the other thing I thought about listening to you was Midnight Cowboy, of course, which I think came out in the sixties, but also it's like a play on classic American archetypes.

Of 

Speaker 9: course, yes. There's a cowboy in it. 

Speaker 8: There's a cowboy in it. 

Speaker 9: But he's a gay cowboy. 

Speaker 8: He's a gay cowboy. 

Speaker 9: Yeah, completely. But I think that's part of what makes that period of American cinema so thrilling because. They, they're actively deconstructing their own mythology in, in a creative way. You know, in the sense it's a bit like, um, I can't, you know, the death of tragedy, is that the name of the book?

I mean, there's a book where he says that basically civilizations create the most interesting artwork on the way down. [00:58:00] Mm-hmm. And there's something about this explosion of American music, cinema literature in the sort of late sixties, seventies that is like, it's, it's a kind of decadence, it's, it's full of the decay of these ideas and this empire, and it's thrilling.

But we don't really know what comes after. I mean, weirdly, what comes after is, is, is, you know. Jaws and Star Wars and, and Fantasies. Yes. 

Speaker 8: Right. Like 1976. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. It's it's a second away. It's a second away from, from the 

Speaker 8: Blockbuster. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. The moment where, you know, the Godfather and Taxi driver, these were like the big biggest films.

The, the Godfather up to 1976 was the highest grossing film in the history of cinema. And then suddenly you get Star Wars and Jaws and Corporate America buys movies and, and movies become [00:59:00] something very different. Juggernauts, juggernaut, entertainment, juggernauts. And they become something very, very different.

And the Travis Pickles of this world are left forgotten in the gutter. No one, no one makes films about them anymore. Yeah, they're certainly not in that context. 

Speaker 8: Um, I wanted to put my psychiatrist hat on and talk about like, what I would think from like a. Diagnosis standpoint. Not 'cause I necessarily think diagnosis is the most useful thing, but I just think it might be interesting.

So again, people throw around the word psychopathy a lot. We did our, our last film's episode was about the moving ninth crawler and along with American Psycho. I think that's a really good portrayal of what psychopathy is, which is this athlete core lack of empathy, lack of regard for rules, uh, willingness to be dishonest, willingness to use aggression, willingness to use people as instruments to advance your goals.

And pretty much your only [01:00:00] motivations are to advance your goals often like a very narrowed emotional range where you might oscillate between superficial charm to get what you want and aggression. That's what I've seen working with certain individuals in a forensic unit earlier in my career. You at a glance, you might look at Travis Bickell and be like, oh, he shot up a bunch of people at the brothel.

Maybe he's a psychopath. He's not. He's sensitive. And again, as we've described, he wants everything that everyone else wants. He just doesn't know how to get it. We could be thinking about trauma because he is a Vietnam Army veteran, but other than insomnia, which isn't necessarily considered a classic PTSD symptom, he actually doesn't show any PTSD symptoms.

Mm-hmm. In that the main symptoms are like anxiety, uh, hyper arousal, like having fast heartbeat, sweating, stuff like that in situations which remind you of the trauma, avoidance of trauma, reenacting [01:01:00] scenarios, flashbacks, nightmares. And so I'm saying that not to say traffic definitely wasn't traumatized, but we want to be thinking about, you know.

It's not necessarily trauma. That's a full explanation. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. 

Speaker 8: For what's going on. I think it's really interesting to look at him from a personality level actually. So if you had to look about, think about him at that level, classically you're thinking about a schizoid type or paranoid personality. This is different.

This is not schizophrenia. So schizophrenia is like hearing voices, uh, delusions. Having a schizoid personality on the other hand is like extreme introversion, just a general distance from people, and then a very, very rich inter in a fantasy world. 

Speaker 9: Hmm. 

Speaker 8: Um, where you can come up with like beliefs, which seem quite like not totally detached in a delusional way.

Like, oh, someone's monitoring my house, but oh, maybe it's a good idea to kill a senator. Mm-hmm. [01:02:00] Um, and so that's, that's what I found myself thinking about with Travis. And it's really this combination of like extreme introversion. A certain sense of mistrust of others, and maybe that might be trauma related, but then also like emotionally sensitive.

He's really lonely. He talks about, and he talks about how unbearable it is, 

Speaker 9: and there's that moment where he writes a letters to a letter to his parents and all he says is, I've met this girl Betsy, and you know, I'm working for the Secret Service. And 

Speaker 8: yeah, 

Speaker 9: he kind of portrays the person he's dreaming of being to them.

And it leads you to imagine them as being like a kind of sweet elderly couple that, that maybe loved him but didn't know him. You know, that, that, that, that in a way, the trauma, if there is a trauma is, is that he, he's always tried to be the person they wanted him to be and he just can't, and he doesn't know how to become the person that he is in a way [01:03:00] that's not destructive.

Speaker 8: Yeah. He roughly knows kind of what words to say that might please them, maybe. But he's not really connected to them. 

Speaker 9: But I think that's why he's such a, a relatable character. I mean, I'm definitely like a schizoid, like, and so I don't think it's a surprise that as a young person, I was so drawn to Travis because even, even his violence, I think, I think when I was young, I don't think I fully understood the minutia of the racism element of the film.

I don't think it was on my radar. Uh, but definitely this rage is, is something that I could live out through him. 

Speaker 8: Mm. 

Speaker 9: Like this rage of wanting to, to set the world on fire. And, and I think for me that rage has often become creative. It, it's, it's propelled me to create, uh, perhaps as it has for the creators of this film.

Um, but I think it points, [01:04:00] it's also burnt me up because I, I don't want to be violent towards other people. But there is all this rage and, and one feels like you could sort of burning in your own skin. Like there's this, just this rage, 

Speaker 8: aggression, 

Speaker 9: aggression, and it doesn't know where to go, and it gets turned inwards and it becomes this kind of fire.

Speaker 8: And I, I mean I'm bu building on that a second like that the, I think that in large part the function of a healthy society is to help men channel their aggression productively. 

Speaker 9: How would you help men now in this, or how do you help them Now? 

Speaker 8: Again, it comes down to like what are your needs and how are you meeting them?

Right? So if I was like talking to Travis in the clinic, what are you would try to help him understand is like, what is it that you want? You want to be in a relationship with a woman. That sounds like an appropriate goal. You probably want some friends, you probably want to do something with your life where you feel like you're contributed and you have meaning.

And I would so. A [01:05:00] lot of his loneliness and his deep desires. I would normalize them. Obviously, I wouldn't necessarily tell him this explicitly, but it would be a process of helping him understand that normalize you have needs. Everyone else also has those needs. And then we might look at perhaps on a quite a practical level, how are you getting those needs met?

And you'll find that people, every, anything someone does is an attempt to get their needs met. And that includes dysfunctional behavior like cocaine or pornography or, um, any, any behavior you can think of. And then it's just a question of like, finding better, more elegant, more sophisticated ways of meeting your needs.

Speaker 9: Yes. 

Speaker 8: And then also just learning the rules of society. 

Speaker 9: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 8: Like yes, that raw confidence you have is good, um, but you also know how to show respect to women. And if you can combine confidence and social calibration and respect, that's one thing that women really respond to. So it's this combination of normalizing needs and then being a bit [01:06:00] strategic about how you're getting those met.

Speaker 9: God, I'd love to see a film where Travis Pickle goes to get therapy. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. I don't, I don't know if that would make a good film. 

Speaker 9: I don't, but, but that's an interesting question. Maybe it wouldn't make for a good film, but it's a really interesting experiment. Like what would happen if we sat Travis down and we're like, so what's really going on, Travis?

Yeah. Like, and, and, and tried to help him. It's funny. A part of me, and maybe this is saying something about myself, but like a part of me doesn't want to cure him. It's definitely something, something about myself. But like, like I don't want there to be dangerous people out there. That's certainly not the way, but I think there's something about his outsider ishness.

But maybe there's a way of normalizing outsiderness. Yeah. Like, like that It's okay that you feel like an outsider, that that doesn't need to be, become a malignant feeling like you can, 

Speaker 8: and society also needs. An element of outsider richness. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. I think that's what my thinking is. Like we need people on the outside because [01:07:00] they also think out of the box.

They don't, they offer us other avenues, other ways of thinking about life. Um, and so it's almost like I wouldn't, I don't know if I would want Travis to be fully cured. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: But I would love him to find a way of being himself that isn't malignant. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. And that's this kind of, I think that's this tension between who we are and our, and our, our relationship to society, which I think Freud talked about this a lot, that it's this constant kind of irreconcilable tension.

You're always gonna have a hard time fitting in, but fit in, you must on some level. And yes, there will be friction. And yes, sometimes we do need to dampen parts of our personality. And so you want to try and find a way where you can express yourself and be who you are, enough of the time that you're not totally incongruent.

But you also need to find a way to communicate with people, um, and for people to understand you and not fear you because you're too unpredictable [01:08:00] and trying to find a balance of both. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. What is it the phrase, isn't it the saying like, turning exceptional misery into everyday suffering or, so the opposite 

Speaker 8: God and variety unhappiness.

Speaker 9: Yeah. Like just learning to, to to live with an acceptable amount of, uh, happiness. 

Speaker 8: Yeah, exactly. 

Speaker 9: Is kind of, but, but I think that's part of the journey that's interesting about the collaboration between Scorsese and De Niro because in a way you can think of all of their films as a, as a recurring, and I think that's guided by De Niro.

I think he's such a smart artist in his choice of like, he figured out that that was their thing. And so you can go from, you know, you can go from mean Streets where he plays Tommy, you know, Tommy boy I think he's called, where he's like the Renegade, this kind of. Charming, uh, uh, person who, who causes so much trouble and the demise of him and his friend.

Then it goes into taxi driver, Travis Bickel. [01:09:00] Then you have Jake Lata, then you have, uh, um, Rupert Popkin. And then, and then as it moves into the nineties, suddenly it becomes like casino, where it's like there's a kind of world of glamor. There's suits, but there's still an outsider quality. And then you have Cape fear.

You know, this kind of, there, I think he is a psychopath, or, or, or, but, but he's, he, he's, again, he's driven by this sense of injustice that he was robbed of his life, his chance, and he completely negates the fact that he's a violent criminal because the counselor. Lied and made sure that he was sent to prison.

And then he sees this sort of bourgeois life that the counselor has and decides to destroy it. And, and it just, it's a kind of ongoing theme in their filmmaking. 

Speaker 8: And, and even Goodfellas, I think Goodfellas is, in my opinion, the best mafia film because it's not like The Godfather, which is about being at the highest echelons of the mafia, being the dawn or whatever [01:10:00] the good Goodfellows is about what's it's like to be on the periphery of the mafia just outside enough.

But just in enough. You have a lot of the benefits of Mob Association, uh, but also not a lot of the protections 

Speaker 9: Yes. 

Speaker 8: From the police. And you're kind of, I mean, basically Goodell's follows three people as they try and get in with the mafia and get that security, but ultimately fail. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. I mean, I don't connect it simply because the Niro isn't the lead of that film.

Speaker 8: True. 

Speaker 9: So I, I, I, I think that's a different strand of the Scorsese RA or whatever. But I think what I love about, about Goodfellas is it's rooted in this wonderful performance by Ray Liotta, and Liotta does something in that film that is really difficult to do. It's, it, it's sort of impossible unless you are just innately, I think, a, a moral person, which is that he is repeatedly placed in these amoral situations.

This is my interpretation of it anyway. He's [01:11:00] repeatedly placed in and these things happened, this violence, these things, and there are these little flashes in each scene, 

Speaker 8: in his face, 

Speaker 9: in his face where you see that he's not sure about this, that he has another viewpoint. And I think he gives that film a moral anchor that the other films don't have in that way because there's always this little recovery in his eyes where you, where he looks at things, he looks at Joe Pei's character, he looks at the, and you can tell that he's thinking.

Is 

Speaker 8: this too much? 

Speaker 9: This is not good. This is not good. And it runs through the film. And so he's on the one hand, super seduced by the violence, and yet there is a part of him that's critical of the violence. And I think that's part of the richness and, and why that film is such a masterpiece. And I I, and I think that the neuro cat, like in Raging Bull, what you get is you get this incredible violence and then [01:12:00] you get these moments where you can see what it's costing him to be so violent to other people and the guilt and the self-loathing.

But it's different. It's, it's a different kind of moral code, uh, than, than in the Goodfellas film. But it's, it's just such a fascinating thing to to, because it's not in the script. If you had read the script for Goodfellas, there is no point where TTAs character expresses any moral qualms. It's just, 

Speaker 8: he's just in the, in the, in the text of the film, the voiceover.

He's self justifying and rationalizing 

Speaker 9: all the time, 

Speaker 8: but then you see it on his face, 

Speaker 9: but then in his eyes, you just see that he feels something else. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: And that's, that's kind of part of the magic of movie making. Like you can't write that. It's, it's an X factor in the film that, that there is suddenly this moral compass at the heart of the film.

Speaker 8: I had [01:13:00] never thought of that, but as soon as he started talking about it, I knew exactly what he meant 

Speaker 9: completely, 

Speaker 8: and it really helped. It's in hindsight, what helps me lock onto his character and identify with him so strongly. 

Speaker 9: And, and Scorsese leans into it, like, if you remember, there's the scene where they beat a guy up in the bar, I can't remember who, but with the bar of a gun.

And then there's a kind of push in on Otto's character as he looks up and it's a moment of synergy between the camera move pointing to us. Look at this. 

Speaker 8: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 9: And this quality and the performance of him kind of going, what is this? Who are we? 

Speaker 8: Is this, is this okay? 

Speaker 9: Is this, is this 

Speaker 8: okay? 

Speaker 9: And then he continues.

Speaker 8: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 9: And he and he stops questioning it. Yeah. And, and, and it's, it's a beautiful, I mean these, you know, it's just, this is like the pinnacle of filmmaking. Like it's just a kind of amazing, and again, it's just this sort of beautiful moral ambiguity of, of, of it really forces you to ask, [01:14:00] well, what would you do?

What would you do here? Are you any better than, than this person? Am I the filmmaker any better than this person? 

Speaker 8: And again, it's such a shame that a lot Good, fair is another one of those films that can be misclassified as like a bro film. And it's, it's so much deeper than that. 

Speaker 9: Yes. But maybe it's both things.

I mean, Schrader says that about Taxi Driver. He said somewhere, he says that, um, all great films become successful in spite of themselves. So it's like in a film or in a work of art, you can have opposing elements that appeal to different people in different ways. And, and sometimes the reason why something becomes widely popular is not necessarily the better angels of the piece.

And that's just part, 

Speaker 8: and that's part of it, 

Speaker 9: part of the deal. 

Speaker 8: Getting back to Taxi Driver, are there any other takeaways you'd want someone to, to bring with them? Say, say a young person or [01:15:00] possibly a young man watching this film? Any other takeaways from this film psychologically you would want to emphasize?

Speaker 9: Weirdly, when you just ask me that, I feel like one of the things that sometimes I've trapped, that I've fallen into is, is not hearing what people say to me when they say it. Like, I'm thinking about that scene where Travis goes to Wizard and he says to him, I've got some, I don't know, man, I've got some dark thoughts.

And Wizard is scared or too crude or whatever to, to hear what this person is saying to him. And I think in my life, not just with men, but with friends, I think sometimes I've not heard friends when they said to me, something is wrong with me. And I've gone, no, no, you're, come on, you're fine. And it's not about being an alarmist, but, but that moment of hearing someone, when they say to you, I'm not okay.

And to really go, what is it? What's going on? Because I think [01:16:00] you can help. And, and I think that's, it's a tragic moment in that film because he, he really tries to ask for help and he can't get it. 

Speaker 8: You can help, not even by solving the problem, just by being willing to listen to it. People really find that helpful.

Speaker 9: Yeah. Just be there with the person and respect their, the authenticity of their voice. And that, that when someone says to you, I'm, I'm struggling, or I'm having thoughts, even if what they're saying to you is scary or uncomfortable, to have the inner reservoirs to stay in it with them for a moment and respect their experience before going, oh, let's solve it.

Or brushing it aside, but rather like, and it's scary, you know, when, when, when friends are depressed or are struggling or people I love are struggling, something in me wants to push it away and, and go, I can't deal with this. I don't [01:17:00] want to hear about it or Let me cheer you up, or, but to actually be with someone.

As a way of elevating that loneliness, even if you can't help. I think, I don't know. That literally came into my mind now when you asked. 

Speaker 8: No, I mean, sometimes people just want to share a bit of the, the darkness they're experiencing and if someone can, um, help them shoulder that for a second, you know, that's like 80% of the work of therapists because 

Speaker 9: when you are in darkness, it's so lonely.

It's like doubly lonely. It's lonely because you're lonely and it's lonely because you're ashamed. And so you want to hide the darkness even more. And so I guess if I were to speak to myself in my own moments of darkness, to to say, be brave enough to share them and as a friend or a love, you know, as a, as a family member or whatever, to to, to shoulder someone's difficulties without.[01:18:00] 

Fear or judgment, 

Speaker 7: I think. 

Speaker 8: Yeah, absolutely. Kind of along similar lines, one takeaway I had was, and this is kind of a piece of theory from Gestalt psychotherapy, is you've kind of formed yourself in relationship with other people, which is a radical idea because we live in a very individualistic culture and maybe living in a, in an individualistic culture, you can get by if you're successful and you have money or power.

But if you're like, Travis can be very difficult. You in relation to other people, if you earnestly engage with other people and take the feedback you can become, uh, you become yourself. And that's way we're constantly in dialogue with our environment. And that's one of the rea reasons why loneliness is so destructive and can feel so unbearable is because you literally feel like yourself is being erased because on some level, yourself is being erased when you cut off relationships.

Um, people wither, even introverted people. So introverted people may need less social contact. Than others, [01:19:00] but they still need social context. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. And, and it connects to something we spoke about before we started, you know, we both, uh, have centered our lives around London in different ways, and there is something thrilling about coming to a mega city because it affords you an anonymity and a space to reinvent yourself and to be alone and to be, to, to explore, uh, experiences and to to be all kinds of different things without the judgments and, and, and cliques of small communities.

But it can also become deeply, deeply lonely. And I think as I was listening to you now, I feel like one of the things that Travis is struggling to accept is his dependence and embrace that he needs people, that he needs people, that he's lonely and he needs people. And that maybe the city, the city that he's so full of contempt with.

Isn't where he needs to be. 

Speaker 8: Uh, and kind of following from that, we live our life in [01:20:00] stories. 

Speaker 9: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 8: You will have a story to your life and it may be like a really bad or dis destructive, like we need to live in myth. 

Speaker 9: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 8: And that myth can become really disconnected from reality. And if you have no kind of sense of agency or authorship over that story, or myth one will come into your consciousness regardless.

Speaker 9: Mm. 

Speaker 8: In Travis's case, it's one about how terrible the world is. 

Speaker 5: Listen, you fuckers, you screw heads here as a man who would not take it anymore. Who would not let listen. You fuckers. You screw heads. Here's a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit.

Here is someone who stood up. 

Speaker 8: So really important to tell yourself, like what is the story you're telling yourself with your thoughts in your diary entries? 

Speaker 9: Mm-hmm. 

Speaker 8: For, is it matching mapping onto reality or is it kind of a fantasy that's serving [01:21:00] some other needs? 

Speaker 9: Yes. Again, that's, you're just talking to me now.

I mean, that's just, yeah. I mean, that is the journey of one's life. Certainly the journey of my life is, you know, Adam Phillips says that, that that, that the journey of psycho narciss isn't about stopping us from telling stories, but rather seeing how many different stories are we allowed to tell. 

Speaker 8: And all these stories are fictional and even the healthy ones are fictional.

Speaker 9: It's all fictional. It's just whether you can tell more than one. 

Speaker 8: Yes, 

Speaker 9: I can be this, but also I can be like this. And, and, and on some level, when you start doing that, you start realizing what you just said, which is that it's all stories. 

Speaker 8: Yes. And, and when I say fictional, I don't mean has no truth in it.

Speaker 9: Yeah. 

Speaker 8: It means it's not the whole truth. And then maybe some like half truths or untruths. So even if you tell yourself like a healthy story of I can be anything I want to be, which I think is kind of a healthy thing, you know, there's part of that that's true. There's part of that that's not true, but just be aware that you're seeing things through a story.

Speaker 9: [01:22:00] Yeah. And there's something beautiful about, I mean, that's kind of the power for me of meditation and stuff. I mean, maybe we should send Travis to an asam, but, but, but it is funny again, just to connect it, that, that, that Scorsese eventually in the, in the nineties becomes very, very fascinated by Buddhism and it, it really starts affecting his, his filmmaking.

Obviously he's a Christian, uh, in, in, up, in his makeup. But, but this idea that it's all stories and that in fact the thing that we are most scared of is that, that all of these stories are, are fictional. That, that it's all make belief and that Travis is inventing stories about himself and the world and they all are all, but that's true about.

All, 

Speaker 8: all humans. 

Speaker 9: All humans in all films, you know? Um, 

Speaker 8: and the, uh, it's also a source of great power for humans because stories are one of the things that enable us to collaborate. Like a company is a story. A country is a story. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. 

Speaker 8: You know, for better or for, [01:23:00] um, a couple of quick fire questions as we wrap up.

What do you think is the most 1970s thing about this, this film? 

Speaker 9: The filth. 

Speaker 8: The filth. Yeah. The grittiness of New York. 

Speaker 9: I love the filth. I mean, one of the things I love about films from the seventies is that they're full of filth and they're full of sweat. People don't sweat in movies anymore. Everyone is really clean all the time.

And when you watch movies from the seventies, they're just sweating. 

Speaker 8: And this apartment is a mess. 

Speaker 9: It's a mess. And it's dirty. And it's like this. It's, I I just love it. I, I, I, there's something about the cleanliness of things now. That may, it's really spooks me and there's something about these films where the kind of grit and filth is exposed.

That's just, I, I can kind of ease in their presence because nothing is being compressed down. It's just there. Yeah. Uh, I love it. There's another great film [01:24:00] from the seventies that I love called All That Jazz, uh, by Bob Fosse. And there's a great sequence in it where they show this dance, it's about choreographer.

They show this dance sequence and they've been working all day. And then you see the sequence of them showing this dance sequence to the producers and everyone is covered in sweat and it's like super sexy, hyper real. 

Speaker 8: It's 

Speaker 9: hyper real, but it's like physical. Yeah. It's full of bodies and hu humans and I feel like nowadays so many films, I'm like.

I don't know why people are so frightened of ai because so many films look like they're already being made in ai. 

Speaker 8: That's a really good point. Yeah. 

Speaker 9: Like the imagery is so clean and everything is so like in its place. And there's something about movies from that era where they're still messy and I just, I love that mess.

I find it liberating. 

Speaker 8: David Fincher's movies are already like polished a lot of them, but then not like if you go back to Fight club. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. Which is why it's, again, it's [01:25:00] funny. Fight Club is in the tradition of taxi driver for sure. In that line of morally ambiguous. Films and it had the same impact on me.

It came out when I was 18, 19. Right. And I, I went to see it in the cinema like four times. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. 

Speaker 9: Because it was, it 

Speaker 8: speaks to the, to the, the lonely man. 

Speaker 9: Yeah. It speaks to that lonely rage format, 

Speaker 8: disenfranchised. 

Speaker 9: But it takes to the level further in the sense that because it's a postmodern film, the fantasy is built into the film and is broken up inside the film.

So maybe that's another good, um, yeah. I mean that is, that is one, that's one evening, uh, on the sofa, it's taxi driver followed, followed by Fight club. But yeah. And, and they both age in a, in a strange way, as you get older, you, you, you watch, or I find myself watching my own fascination with these films with a sense of curiosity.

Speaker 8: It's interesting. Yeah. Do you have a favorite quote from Taxi Driver? 

Speaker 9: Uh, I'll [01:26:00] say the thing that came into my mind, you're gonna rotten hell with the rest of them. I don't know. That's the first thing that came in into my mind. Uh, 

Speaker 8: I had, um, what is 

Speaker 9: yours? 

Speaker 8: I had, um, God's lonely man, but I actually chose Travis' talking to, um, Betsy on the, their first date.

And she's talking about potentially going to live in a commune. Do you know 

Speaker 9: the story, Iris? Iris? 

Speaker 8: Was it Iris? 

Speaker 9: Uh, when he has breakfast with Iris, and she says, and he says he'll pay for her to go to this commune. 

Speaker 8: Yeah. So they're talking about the commune, and Travis goes, I've never seen a commune before, but I don't know, you know, I saw some pictures once in a magazine.

It didn't look very clean. 

Speaker 9: It didn't look very clean. But again, this obsession with cleanliness, I noticed that scene again, uh, uh, weirdly recently. But there's also like, I love that in the moment when him and Betsy are in the, in the cafe and, and she says, uh, he's a prophet and a, ah, I can't remember it, so I can't say that it's my favorite quote, but it's the Kris Kristofferson line and she says he's a prophet and a pusher.

That metaphor of like a prophet and a pusher. [01:27:00] When I watched the film this time, I thought that's kind of like at the heart of the movie, this, this split in him between this criminal, this violence. And the kind of saintliness to him. 

Speaker 8: Yes. 

Speaker 9: This sort of deep belief in good that he has, he 

Speaker 8: has like that he does want to do good things.

Speaker 9: Yes. And he wants the world to be good. Yeah. He's sort of devastated in that sense. I know you've done stuff about David Lynch, like I think there is something about Lynch's darkness, which is, is also rooted in a deep faith in goodness. Yeah. He's totally onic and and unrealistic, but he believes that there is good and there is bad in the world and and he wants it to be good, but he can't help but see the darkness as 

Speaker 8: well.

Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. I really had fun doing this. Thanks so much for coming on, Tom. 

Speaker 9: Thank you. I had fun too. Yeah.