Taxi Driver II.

January 21, 2005 -- ROBERT De Niro has confirmed he’s in talks with Martin Scorsese about a possible sequel to their classic Taxi Driver. The acting legend, who starred as crazed cabbie Travis Bickle in the gritty 1976 masterpiece, says he and Scorsese have been mulling over script ideas. De Niro, 61, recently told journalists: “I was talking with Martin Scorsese about doing what I guess you’d call a sequel to Taxi Driver, where he is older.” The reunion would come just in time for De Niro, whose reputation is eroding with critically panned films like Meet the Fockers.

— New York Post

Taxi Driver II

Act I

After the shooting spree, bloodbath and rescue of Iris Steensma, Travis Bickle is celebrated as a hero. Reaction is ambivalent, too — much as it was in the case of Bernhard Goetz a decade later: People shouldn’t take the law into their own hands. Law enforcement and government officials pay lip service to that notion. But people are grateful to Bickle as well, and most of them would like to do something similar, given the right circumstances and the opportunity.

Charles Palantine’s presidential campaign picks up on the mood, hiring Bickle as a combination limo driver/policy advisor and public-opinion gauge. He’s treated deferentially by the campaign. He’s still also a nut, and nobody wants to annoy him or have any of that fury turned on them. Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) continues to be fascinated by Bickle — even more so, now that his mix of charisma and psychosis seems to be drawing political interest. Travis still makes Albert Brooks’s Tom nervous.

That’s all revealed in the opening credits. We pick up the story in 2000. Travis Bickle’s combination of Vietnam experience and determination have made him an excellent political strategist and operative. He’s switched parties, splitting with Palantine — a Democrat — over law-and-order issues; Travis Bickle is a Republican. Peter Boyle reprises his strategist role from the 1972 picture The Candidate Robert Redford, melded together with the character “Wizard” from the original Taxi Driver, only in this instance, he’s Bickle’s strategist/fixer. Bickle has served a couple of terms as mayor of New York, cleaning up Times Square — because as a regular patron of the ’70s grind houses, who’d know better about what kind of filth and depravity it was a breeding-ground for? — and turning it into the family-friendly theme park it’s become.

Now, he’s preparing to seek the Republican presidential nomination, with the backing of such notables at Guardian Angels founder and talk radio host Curtis Sliwa. (In this version, the Angels are still self-appointed maintainers of public order and safety, only they’ve modeled themselves after Bickle; instead of the T-shirts and red berets, they all sport Mohawks.) Some potentially damaging information surfaces, un known provenance: allegations that there may have been more to Travis’s relationship with Iris than a noble desire to rescue a girl in trouble.

Travis Bickle thinks he knows where it’s coming from. Wizard begs him to leave this kind of thing — running down and stamping out smears or rumors — to the professionals. But this time, it’s personal. Travis is certain it’s Tom, stemming from his jealousy about Betsy and his feeling that Travis Bickle is truly dangerous and has to be stopped. It’s a conflict between strategy and information, on Tom’s side, and action as typified by Travis. Bickle is determined to confront Tom and make him retract the allegations he’s sure Tom’s responsible for. As his quest accelerates, so does the frequency of discomfiting questions about Iris from various reporters and associates. The one person who could instantly stop all this, of course, can’t be found. Iris has disappeared, changed her name and built a new life for herself. She’s determined to leave her sordid past of prostitution and drug addiction as far behind as possible.

The first act ends with Travis confronting Tom, and Tom definitively proving he doesn’t have anything to do with the allegations. That raises two big questions. If Tom’s not behind it, who is? And where is Iris Steensma?

Act II
We find out who is behind the allegations. Sport, the pimp played by Harvey Keitel, is, of course, shot and killed during Travis Bickle’s climactic shooting spree in Taxi Driver. Scorsese and Keitel worked together before, on the picture that was the feature film debut for both of them. Harvey Keitel played J.R., the conflicted Catholic protagonist in Who’s That Knocking At My Door? written and directed by Scorsese in 1967. Now, it turns out, he and Sport were twins. J.R. worked to reconcile his Madonna/whore complex by rehabilitating prostitutes and drug addicts. One of them was Iris “Easy” Steensma. At first, of course, he doesn’t realize there’s any connection. But in flashback, we see him getting to know Iris’s story, realizing the connection with his twin brother, Sport — something he keeps from Iris. She bonds with him, but his feelings about women of Iris’s ilk prevent him from acting on his affectionate feelings.

(The weak spot here, obviously, is Iris. Wouldn't she recognize Sport? You could make J.R. really clean-cut, which would help differentiate him from Sport. Iris might even say J.R. reminds her of someone, without having her realize who . . . or maybe she does, but thinks she's mistaken or confused.)

J.R.'s conflicted feelings fester, and he comes to hate both his dead twin brother and Travis Bickle for killing him. When Bickle’s candidacy gathers momentum, J.R. is moved to try derailing him by leaking the details about Iris, even though they’re not true. J.R. is keen to make her more of a victim, more powerless, and by characterizing Bickle as the last in a long line of tormentors and abusers, he can reduce his feelings of revulsion toward her. The way J.R. sees it, Travis Bickle’s shootout traumatized Iris worse than anything she’d endured before that moment, that she felt she was to blame for all the bloodshed, and even if her exploiters were evil, she feels she killed them instead of escaping from them.

J.R.’s desire to rescue her curdles, turning his conception of himself from a rescuer to an avenger. Simply imperiling Bickle’s candidacy isn’t enough. J.R. becomes determined to assassinate Bickle, and we move through the second act with a series of scenes of J.R.’s preparation to kill Bickle that parallel Bickle’s preparations to shoot Palantine in Taxi Driver. At one chilling moment, we see Harvey Keitel staring into a mirror menacingly, and repeating, “I’m talking to you.”

This is intercut with Travis Bickle’s search for Iris Steensma. Poring over old phone books, files and Internet resources, he eventually tracks her down. She’s living in Vermont under a completely different name, alone, and refuses to come back to the city or to help Travis out of his jam; it would be too difficult to admit to her past and return to what she’d thought she’d escaped. Travis argues that he saved her when she needed it, and now he needs her help. It seems hopeless, and Iris seems determined not to leave her refuge — the emotional cost would be too great. But she does give him J.R.’s name as a person who might be able to help him. Travis leaves determined to fix this, and that may mean dealing with J.R. himself. The potential for violence has been ratcheted tighter.

Act III
Travis returns to the city as J.R.’s fury grows colder, more lethal and more determined. Travis gets ready to confront J.R.; J.R. is preparing to assassinate Travis. J.R. appears at a campaign rally, staying just long enough to be seen by Travis as a means of demonstrating he can get to him when he wants to.

After the rally, Travis tracks J.R. down. We see him preparing for this confrontation. Because he knows J.R. is armed, Travis has a gun as well. He comes up on J.R. in a deserted street. He tells him it’s over. That he can’t achieve whatever he’s after. Nervous about what J.R. might do, Travis has a handgun. J.R., noting this, makes the point that Travis has not changed, that he’s still violent and crazy. This makes Travis angry. He raises the gun, yelling for J.R. to shut up, when there’s a shout. A woman’s voice. It’s Iris. J.R., furious at what he thinks is a betrayal, shoots, but only wounds her. Travis, having wanted to protect Iris and himself, shoots J.R.

In the denouement, Iris clears Travis, who is lauded as a hero. Again.

Many great HST memorials, but Hitchens blows it (again).

A lot of varied opinion and differing levels of appreciation and intelligent thinking on the passing of Hunter S. Thompson. The best included Gideon Yago on MTV’s site, which edged ahead of Kurt Loder’s piece on same for style and insight. David McCumber in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was good; same for William McKeen in the St. Petersburg Times, David Carr in The New York Times, the Boston Globe story/interview with Thompson’s lawyer offers some insight about how this came to happen, in addition to more insight, and finally — worth waiting the extra day for, definitely — Ralph Steadman in Britain’s Independent.

Of course, as might be expected, there was a lot of shameless, sub-par, crummy mock-Hunter fakery intended to honor his memory but which only profaned his achievement. Perhaps worst of all, though — worse, even, than the doltish imitation of the legions of witless fans who missed the point and the truth and the poetry, was the always-contemptible Christopher Hitchens. His crapulent extrusion turned up on Slate, which was surprising, since Slate’s usually a lot smarter, particularly about popular culture, politics and writing. Were all the good writers busy? Did Hitchens’s bolus of self-aggrandizing, off-point mumbling come over the transom?

Regardless of how it happened, it was certainly unfortunate; of all the people who could have written an obituary for Hunter Thompson, Slate had to make do with Hitchens's damp, flaccid squib.

At least this “effort” is in line with everything else the worthless sot has ever done; solipsistic to a fault, too long and yet perversely insubstantial:

“I, Christopher Hitchens, was in Aspen. I, Christopher Hitchens, was insufficiently inebriated. I, Christopher Hitchens, pointlessly shoe-horned Saddam Hussein into my lead. I, Christopher Hitchens, determined to become sufficiently inebriated, deigned to brighten Hunter Thompson’s day with my wobbling, doughy presence . . . [lucky Hunter]. I, Christopher Hitchens, shamelessly padded my word-count with flabby, meandering sentences that read like something from a 19th-century Grub Street penny-dreadful slushpile . . .”

Eventually, after 326 words about Hitchens, we get to the putative subject, and are rewarded with what may be the lamest entry in a crowded and mostly disappointing field. It misses the point of Thompson’s work and shows no evidence of appreciation for his journalistic abilities, reportorial diligence, analytical ability, insight, foresight, the places, times or people that Thompson was writing about or Thompson’s mastery of the language. Even if the political analysis was too cogent or incisive for Hitchens, you might hope he’d at least be able to appreciate that Hunter Thompson could write.

But I'm being unfair. How could we expect Mr. Hitchens to appreciate qualities in someone else’s work that are so glaringly absent from his own?

Fortunately, the Web and its contents and connections mean that there are plenty of obits that admirably accomplish what Mr. Hitchens couldn’t be bothered to attempt.

Where most of us familiar with that old SNL sketch line, “Yeah, but what does it mean to me, Al Franken?” recognize it for the joke it is, mocking extreme solipsism, Hitchens — not surprisingly — did not understand it was supposed to be a joke and apparently adopted it as his standard modus operandi.

Really, every single thing that oozes off Hitchens’s desk should begin, “I, Christopher Hitchens, regain consciousness . . .” Every scrap of ill-wrought yawp he extrudes comes with a built-in deniability option: “Urp . . . sorry . . . that must have been the booze talking.”

Unfortunately, that can’t be the case; booze would have been less tedious, more illuminating and more generous of spirit.

Montgomery Burns said it about U2, but it applies to Hitchens just as well: “Wanker.”

Hunter Stockton Thompson. July 18, 1937 - February 20, 2005.

Well, what can one say? I guess we all figured as time passed and Dr. Thompson blew past one milestone after another that he’d blow past 70 with just as much fury and élan as he’d careered through everything else. Sure, there were those rumors about the toll the alcohol and narcotics intake had taken. (My favorite was the contention that his liver was so distended it prevented him from tucking his shirt into his pants . . . no reason not to think that was true.) But as much as he abused himself or tried to fuel the flight from whatever demons were chasing him, there was also the fact of his apparent indomitability, the idea that he’d prevail, just as he had thought the Sixties generation would simply prevail, as predicted in that passage from Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas that will be quoted and quoted and quoted in the coming days as people try to make Thompson one of the “doomed refugees of the Love Generation,” as he called Sixties folks.

But that misses the point — as a lot of stuff written about Thompson while he was still alive did, also — and tries to put him in that particular box of nostalgic ideas about that decade. But he was not just in front of that idea and some social trends. He was a force unto himself. What the Sixties did was provide him with a venue and an audience. But he could be just as brutally and hilariously dismissive of both venue and audience as he could about the Kentucky Derby or anything else he examined at close range and found to be half-assed, disappointing, bent, spindled, crushed or twisted: When Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo finally find what’s left of the American dream in Las Vegas, it’s a charred slab of concrete in a weed-choked vacant lot. The book has one kick after another at the corpse of the 1960s. Sergeant Pepper is not the anthem of a generation; it’s something coming out of Harry James’s trumpet as Debbie Reynolds is “yukking across the stage in a silver afro wig.” The soundtrack for the first part of the journey through the desert to Las Vegas isn’t anything by Dylan or the Beatles. It’s “Sympathy for the Devil,” a hymn celebrating some of the basest moments in human history. “White Rabbit” isn’t the musical accompaniment for kicking open the doors of perception. It’s the musical accompaniment to having a 300-pound Samoan try to kill Duke or himself . . . not that it really matters. In fact, like Manson, he tried to soothe Duke by telling him he only wanted carve a little ‘z’ in his forehead . . .

Thompson knew the 1960s were dead in 1970. It took another five years or so for the rest of the culture to catch up. Anybody who had hoped that perhaps as some of the 1960s idealists grew up, they might transmute some of their youthful idealism into political pragmatism should have been following Thompson’s work more closely. He knew where that led, having followed that experiment through the Freak Power uprising in Aspen, and having shown in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 that the brutal realities of politics were the same and had the same ends whether they were being played out across the republic or in one mountain village. Not that such things stopped him. He thought of running for the U.S. Senate from Colorado for awhile, and tried to work out a way to bring some of his Freak Power insights and lessons to bear on the national political stage.

There will be a lot of musing-out-loud about whether Thompson was trying to live up to (or down to) expectations that resulted from his public persona. In fact, in everything that’s been written about him and related by people who worked with him, the persona that emerged in his writing was a lot calmer and more rational than anything he did out in the world.

The letters in The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America show that he was that way long before there was a 1960s drug culture. He was a connoisseur of derangement. Under different circumstances, he could have started issuing a narcotics/hallucinogenic newsletter — something like The Wine Spectator, only for drug fanciers. One has only to read “First Visit with Mescalito” (in Songs of the Doomed) or any of his descriptions of the effects of everything from LSD to ether in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to see that he was able to cogently and evocatively describe the effects of whatever brain-scrambling compound he ingested. In fact, in reading this story in the New York Times Magazine three weeks ago, I was reminded of that passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas about Thompson’s encounter with “name deleted at insistence of publisher’s lawyer.”

MAGAZINE DESK January 30, 2005, Sunday
“Dr. Ecstasy” By DRAKE BENNETT (NYT) 4390 words
Late Edition - Final , Section 6 , Page 32 , Column 1
DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 4390 WORDS – “Alexander Shulgin, Sasha to his friends, lives with his wife, Ann, 30 minutes inland from the San Francisco Bay on a hillside dotted with valley oak, Monterey pine and hallucinogenic cactus. At 79, he stoops a little, but he is still well over six feet tall. . .”

The story goes onto detail Dr. Shulgin’s work, which seems to have consisted — for decades — of imagining drug compounds, fabricating them in his lab, ingesting them and making careful notes on their psychoactive/emotional results. Both he and Thompson lived in the Bay Area for awhile. Maybe they found each other . . .

Thompson’s drug intake always seemed like a means to an end. He said he knew there wasn’t any enlightenment to be found, that he just liked to gobble the stuff and see what would happen. And, as he also said, he never wrote when he was on drugs. So the drugs don’t seem to have been fuel for chasing insight, but fuel to escape something else . . . the drugs were just a more completely deranging, more powerful form of fuel than the alcohol that preceded them. Thompson seemed to like shocks and surprises more than anything. That was true when he threw a bag of lye around a bar in New York, when he and Oscar Acosta tried to freak out and baffle people in Las Vegas, and he apparently liked to do it most of all to himself — throw something weird at his brain and try to maintain, to function, despite a terrible self-inflicted mental/perceptual handicap.

Hunter Thompson wrote his own obituary in a number of different forms and places. And, like the “symbiotic trapezoid quote lead” he pioneered in one of his Nixon/Watergate stories, any decent, worthwhile obit that could do him justice would have to be lashed together from a range of disparate sources: the top could come from his “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum” piece for the National Observer, where he tried to piece together what had changed in the world and in Ernest Hemingway that led him to shoot himself on July 2, 1961. Somewhere in there would have to be that line from his story about Jean-Claude Killy, where he described fame as “a crazily inflated culture-economy that eats its heroes like hot dogs and honors them on about the same level.” His obituary for Lionel Olay, “The Ultimate Freelancer” would have to be in there as well, because it contained a lot of explanation about what Thompson achieved. Throw in that passage about Louisville’s Cherokee Park from the unpublished first novel Prince Jellyfish. Somewhere, we would also have to include, as counterpoint to Thompson’s righteous rage about the Republic of the United States and its inability to live up to the noblest aspirations of the Framers, Robinson Jeffers’s poem, “Be Angry at the Sun,” which I first encountered — as a lot of people did — in Campaign Trail ’72. There could be a couple of lines in there someplace from Thompson's obituary for Oscar Zeta Acosta, especially the point at which Thompson describes him as "a mutant . . . a prototype never even considered for mass production."

I think that’ll about cover it. But there’s one more thing that would have to be in there: a piece of insight from his two-part Rolling Stone story [“Fear and Loathing in the Near Room”; Fear and Loathing in the Far Room”] about Muhammad Ali: “Some try to write their novels, some try to live them, and some fools try to do both.” Thompson said Ali was trying to sidestep that entire dilemma and cut a new path by “living his own movie.” But long before Clay/Ali even imagined doing that, another Louisville native had beaten him to it.

Fear and Loathing

“To William J. Kennedy
Nov. 22, 1963
Woody Creek, Colorado

“There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything — much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder. God knows I might go mad for lack of talk. I have become like a psychotic sphinx — I want to kill because I can’t talk.

“I suppose you will say the rotten murder has no meaning for a true writer of fiction, and that the ‘real artists’ in the ‘little magazines’ are above such temporal things. I wish I could agree, but in fact I think what happened today is far more meaningful than the entire contents of the ‘little magazines’ for the past 20 years. And the next 20, if we get that far . . .

“Fiction is dead. Mailer is an antique curiosity. The stakes are now too high and the time too short . . . The only hope now is to swing hard with the right hand , while hanging onto sanity with the left. Politics will become a cockfight and reason will go by the boards. There will have to be somebody to carry the flag.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
The Proud Highway