Taxi Driver, Directed by Martin Scorsese

Starring Robert De Niro

Behold! One of the greatest films of all time, according to critics and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! Robert De Niro! Jodie Foster! Harvey Keitel! Others!

I thought it just okay.

I’m not a psychologist, but I don’t think Travis Bickle fits the “psycho” label. Or at least to the degree as others on my reading/watching list for this semester. Maybe it’s because of his service in Vietnam, but I felt Bickle was less psycho and more traumatized. Here’s a man who spent three years in the Marine Corps, probably a good chunk of that time in Vietnam, and when he was discharged he was just set loose without the benefit of separation or psychological counseling. This is all stuff that’s common now, but to a soldier or Marine coming out of one of the most unpopular wars (that we arguably did not win), there was a severe sense of abandonment.

The U.S. government spent a lot of time and money turning military members into killers with no clear mission. Unlike wars before, where the mission was to preserve American freedoms, our servicemembers went to Vietnam with little more than propaganda to motivate their fighting. I’m not saying that all servicemembers were damaged and forgotten by the government, but in the case of this movie, that’s exactly what happened.

So, we have Travis Bickle, who probably suffers from some sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome, trying to find his way in the big city. That itself is a huge contrast from the jungles of Vietnam. He spent so much time fighting for something he didn’t understand, that when he comes home he can only see the filth and decay wrought by those fortunate enough not to do the same. I’ll say it, I’d be pissed and a little crazy too.

He was trained to be a hero, but Vietnam wasn’t a hero’s war; it was something uncertain and dirty and amorphous. When he came home, Bickle just wanted to fulfill the destiny that was promised to him.

He sees Betsy, the attractive campaign volunteer, being used the same way he was by politicians. So he attempts to free he from it. First, by trying to date her and convincing she’s being treated poorly. Is this his warning to her that he knows how it is to be treated unfairly by politicians? To be used for their gain? Am I reading too much into the film? Or not enough? If I write the rest of this in questions, will anybody notice?

Of course, their courtship ends abruptly when he takes her to an adult theater. Is it because he’s a psycho, or because his own midwestern innocence has been corrupted by the porn and prostitution so sought after in Vietnam? It’s easy to believe that he feels that sort of film is normal after being subjected to attitudes that condone it while serving oversees. I myself saw early on in my military career the normalization of porn and prostitution, two subjects I grew up feeling were taboo. Things have changed since then of course, but if I’d left the military after my first tour, would I have still believed them to be taboo, or would I have embraced them as normal for a short time following my discharge?

Betsy shuns him, so he takes it to the next level: kill the man who is enslaving her before she can be used further. That also fails so he goes after solving the greatest social injustice he’s aware of: the prostitution of a 12.5-old-girl. Jodie Foster, who was that age for the filming of the movie, was absolutely superb in her role. It would be easy to dismiss her as older than she actually was, just by her acting chops.

He knows he’s damaged going into the climax, but he also feels he’s on a mission as seen by his mohawk. Soldiers and Marines in Vietnam would often shave their heads or give themselves a mohawk before going on what they thought of extremely important, difficult missions. That comes across in this film, and is a nice touch on the part of the filmmakers, yet the reasoning is lost on a lot of new audiences. They just see it as a kooky move by Travis Bickle to show how crazy he really is.

But he isn’t crazy, not like the rest of the villains in this course. After the shootout, in which he takes out three baddies, he’s hailed a hero and returns to work as a cab driver. We see him return to a normal life as he knows it, but there is no sense that he’s still out for blood.

Was this a great film? Probably. Is it one that I love? No. Not because it wasn’t good, but because it’s not what it’s marketed as. It should be marketed as a war movie, not a psychological thriller. I will say it's a far better film than Jarhead, which arguabley had the same message.

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, by Vincent Bugliosi

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this blog. Do I write about the writing prowess of LA prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (with a little help from Curt Gentry), or do I focus on the psychotic nature of its subject? I’m going to go with…

The Manson Family, a cult of hippies in the late 1960s. Everybody knows the story: In the summer of 1969, members of the Family murdered seven people over two nights in what is now referred to as the Tate-LaBianca murders. Everybody involved with Manson at the time was damaged. That’s my official diagnosis. From Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel, Mary Brunner, and Charles Watson to the rest living with Manson on his roaming communes, each one was searching for something. It might have been acceptance, love, or themselves. Whatever they were looking for, they found it with somebody possibly more damaged than themselves.

Charles Manson’s childhood, when taken by itself, is heartbreaking. An absent father, a mother more interested in men than her little boy, bouncing in and out of institutions. He makes a compelling case for the nature vs. nurture debate, and one must wonder if he would have been so desperate for acceptance if he’d had a different upbringing. As a writer, the Manson character makes for a good template to create a character from.

His behavior during the trial wavers on outlandish, and if I’d seen it in a book I’d probably feel it was forced by the writer. But, seeing that a real psychopath can unhinge and react like that under pressure should alleviate the concerns of many writers feeling they’ve written a character that acts out of character from time to time. We don’t see how Manson acted 100 percent of the time while with his Family, so we don’t know if this is just a one-time response to the trial, or a recurring trait. If this were fiction, I’d like to have seen a glimpse of that side of him at some point earlier in the story. It’s a telling side: a petulant child not getting his way. I think that harkens back to his childhood, which was more or less robbed form him by his mother. I would love to see a more in-depth analysis of Manson’s behavior (delivered in an interesting way… I don’t want to read a psychiatrist’s report).

There's an incredible amount of symbolism in this book, especially as it refers to the Beetles, but there's also a cold, real-world truth to it. Manson was out for petty revenge. Whether it was to recover money from a loan or to right the perceived wrongs of the world, Manson was as much thug as psycho.

This is the second book I’ve “read” as an audio book, and it was a conscious decision to do so. I bought the hardcover book (more about that below), but the more I thought about it, the more I felt this story needed to be told to me, out loud, to get through the forensics, police procedures and courtroom drama. And I felt it worked really well in that format. I have the hardcover to refer back to, and I’ll probably use it for reference, even if some of the material is dated (as far as investigative technology and procedures go). What isn’t dated is the way the human psyche bends under the will of charismatic persons, especially when both parties are damaged.

As an interesting note, I bought my hardcover copy second hand, and when I cracked it open, there was an address label belonging to the previous owner. Because it was so girly and flowery, I decided to look them up to see what kind of person would read a book like this, and tag it with such a pretty sticker. Eerily enough, this book belonged to a 92 year old woman who died in a house fire, and the book came from her estate.

There’s no evidence the book is haunted at this time. But that’s another RIG, and one I’ve done already.

Misery, by Stephen King

This is one of the first books I read by Stephen King. It was the early ‘90s, and while I didn’t catch the full extent of the underlying themes at the time (drug addiction, his own love/hate relationship with fans, his pending “retirement”), but I could tell this book was written from a place filled with pain and uncertainty. Reading it again, more than 20 years later, those feelings are more apparent.

Misery is beautifully written, which makes the fact he wrote it while coked to the gourd even more astounding. When King develops characters, he makes them real to the reader. They aren’t merely vessels to move the plot along, but people whose situation we genuinely care about. When you put two characters in a room together and set the entirety of your novel there, you’re bound to get to know them on a deeper level.

That’s what happens in Misery. It’s a claustrophobic tale that’s told from the POV of Paul Sheldon, and we see no more than what Paul sees. After some time, the reader begins to feel it is they that are bed and wheelchair ridden. I want to believe that Sheldon was fun for King to write because he didn’t have to worry about secondary, tertiary and… --quadriary? fourthiary?—characters. He became Paul Sheldon. But, sadly, Paul Sheldon isn’t the topic if this class. It’s Psychos. So let’s meet Annie Wilkes.

Annie Wilkes, Paul Sheldon’s Number One Fan, rescues him after a snowy car accident and brings him back to her house to mend. An unhinged woman, “solid all the way through, with no soul,” is an ex-nurse with a shadowy past (she turns out to be one of those angels of death nurses and loves to kill people and make it look like an accident). She’s also pissed because Pauly killed off her favorite heroine, Misery Chastain, so that he could turn his focus from gothic romance to “serious” literature. When she sees what he’s been spending his time working on, she forces him to burn it and replace it with a new Misery Chastain book just for her.

A lopped off foot and thumb later, and Sheldon finishes the book under duress. And he loves it!

But we spend so much time in Paul’s head, that we don’t really learn too much about Annie except through his descriptions. What we do know is that she loses her temper quickly, often blanks out, and has a laughing place. She would be a caricature of psychosis if King hadn’t created a well-sketched background for her. Through all her little proclivities and idiosyncrasies, Annie becomes not just evil incarnate, but an evil that just sees herself as just a little wonky. She

knows she’s evil, she just thinks it’s a personality quirk. Of course, we see through her scrapbook of horror (the second time I’ve gotten to use that phrase in as many months!), she’s been a little quirky for a long time.

From her colloquialisms to the way King describes her responses to Paul’s behavior (she goes blank mid-sentence, only to begin pick up where she left off minutes later), Annie Wilkes is about as well-developed a serial killer in fiction can get. There’s no real trigger in her background (which is pieced together over the course of the book, with one big data dump in the form of her photo album labeled “Memory Lane”), leaving the reader to realize that sometimes psychos are just born that way.

Silence of the Lambs

Directed by Jonathan Demme

Starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins

I’ve never met anybody that said they didn’t like Silence of the Lambs. Everybody has their favorite moments. Whether it’s Sir Anthony Hopkins making that fft-fft-fft sound, or Ted Levine tucking his manhood between his legs and dancing to “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus, there’s something for the whole family.

While the plot isn’t overly ambitious, and could have easily been done on any crime-of-the-week TV show, the direction of the film and the performances by its core cast created a film that transcends the average police procedural. The roles of Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter netted Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins each an Academy Award. The film also received Oscars for Best Film, Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. I note the awards as proof that a police procedural can not only be engaging, but artistic.

And also terrifying. While many people note the horrifying performance by Anthony Hopkins, I think it’s Ted Levine’s that was true genius. He played the antagonist, Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, in such a nuanced way that each scene of his featured a different side of the character. I watched as Levine took us through the unassuming man with a broken arm, the vicious killer, the seemingly stoned man Starling meets at the door, and the tortured transgender who wants so desperately to be anything other than himself. There is a lot of imagery in this film, and one could argue that there’s too much. From moths to harvesting skin, to anagrams (which in itself is a clue as they portray a thing that isn’t what it appears to be), we’re all but spoon-fed the driving force behind Jame Gumb’s crimes.

But that’s just me over-analyzing. Nit-picking, if you will. Because I, like 95 percent of the people who rated it on Rotten Tomatoes, loved it. It was raw, gritty, smart, artistic and scary. We can all remember the way we felt the first time we saw a green-hued Clarice stumbling blindly through the dark while Buffalo Bill reaches out in a sick desire to touch her. Aside from that, I think it’s the only time I’ve ever hoped a dog would fall down a well.

But the breakout performance, the one that sticks out in everybody’s mind, is that of Anthony Hopkin’s portrayal of the cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter. So ingrained on our collective memories, is the image of a large, proper Englishman who loves nothing more than human liver and Chianti, that it’s difficult to picture anybody else playing him. It’s easy to forget that Lecter is of German descent, and should, by all accounts, have a German accent. When I first saw the TV series Hannibal, I was so turned off by the new take on the character I couldn’t get through the first episode. That’s all changed now, of course, and I find Mads Mikkelsen’s turn with the character very good (even if it’s more of a Dutch accent than German…).

Silence of the Lambs is about as close to cinematic perfection as one can get, and that is owing a lot to the cast, screenplay, and original source material by Thomas Harris. I mention the original author so late in my post because I touted his genius last week, and that part of me feels the success of this movie resulted in two less-than-worthy successors: Hannibal and Hannibal Rising.

So what is it about Lecter that people love in small doses, but find hard to, ahem, swallow, in large portions? I think a lot of it is the mysteriousness of his character in Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs. We are presented with a psycho that has been convicted of such heinous crimes, that they’ve become lore. He is the basis of the monster under our bed. He represents the worse that could happen to us if we become a census-taker.

But in larger roles, he becomes a caricature of a psycho. In short, Hannibal Lecter is scary because he isn’t understood. Hannibal Lecter is scary because we don’t want to know him.