Daily Archives: January 5, 2011

While Watching : Taxi Driver

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Watching the classic film Taxi Driver for the first time ever.

My god, De Niro as Travis Bickle is charismatic so far in the movie. He is just so honest and fresh faced and intense and handsome and compelling. I can’t fault Betsy for falling for him as much as she has so far in the flick. He’s so charismatic that if I was her, I would almost feel like I had no choice. Like he is just so fascinating and sexy and unique that falling for him is like gravity, it’s not a decision, it’s a force of nature.

This almost makes me forgive his recent tragic decline.

It’s not hard to see how his personality could turn dark and ugly quite easily, though. That very honest intensity could easily become obsessive fanatacism, because the main reason he is so attractive is that he believes every word he say with every fiber of his being. true believer, all the way down the line, and that is a very dangerous kind of individual. He has no real self-doubt, and follows his own passions without hesitation. That is great when he is feeling romantic, but that same intensity and passion will be there when he grows angry, or suspicious, or even just confused.

He has no buffer between him and reality. He feels everything one hundred percent. Everything, therefore, is high stakes. And you can see that his inner life is as intense and vivid as his calm, placid demeanor is not.

Some of us seem calm and friendly because we’re too busy dealing with our own inner demons to spend much energy in a lot of what other people feel is the stuff of daily life. The interpersonal struggles, the chaos, the thrust and parry…. that stuff does not reach us on our distant little planets.

But when something does reach us…. it gets our WHOLE attention.

I am just glad I have an overdeveloped sense of irony that keeps things in perspective. going to k

I have trouble imagining his last name to be Bickle, though. I mean, what kind of a name is that? And I have trouble imagining De Niro as anything but Italian, especially not with the New York voice going. He’s always at least a little Italian to me.

Wow, is this ever a Before They Were Famous movie. Jodie Foster AND Cybil Shepherd? Wow. Plus a whack of other people I have heard of, like Harvey Keitel.

Ah, the very chic Seventies dating activity of going to a porno film. People dared each other into it. Besty ain’t havin’ it though. She is way too much the uptighty whitey educated blond princess to watch people fuck.

And the thing is, I think his surpise at her reaction is genuine. He is that out of touch with reality. To him, they are just movies

I identify with him just a little.

Oh, great. Travis is already off the deep end and sinking because Betsy won’t have anything to do with him any more, and he picks up a crazy Jew who tells him “My wife is in that apartment with a nigger, and I am going to kill them both. ” That’s all he needs… more crazy.

“Loneliness has followed me my whole life. ” Amen, brother. Me too. And the real kicker is when you realize that you havve nobody to blame for your loneliness but yourself. You do it, you stay distant, you keep people away, you retreat into that inner world to escape your own sensitivity. And that’s why you are lonely, and nothing and nobody can fix that for you. You either learn other ways to cope, ones that let other people in, or you freeze to death from the inside out.

It really seems like, amidst all the sleaze and dirt, people would really try to relate to each other directly. It didn’t always work, but I admire it still.

And now he has a fuckton of guns and is working out all the time. Yup. He’s got a new religion and it’s not Jesus.

It’s violence. Power. Control. Revenge. All American solving your problems with killing. Not pretty.

He’s either going to kill Pallatine or Betsy. Or both I guess.

It’s amazing to see how charming and friendly and charismatic he can be while all the while also seeming insane and dangerous to us the audience. De Niro puts all that on the screen. The scene with the secret service agent is amazing. You really get the feel for just how dangerous he is because he just does not operate by the same rules as everyone else. He rolls his own reality and smokes it and he does it so well that you don’t even notice anything is different.

I have felt like pointing a gun at American Bandstand myself.

Shit, he tells his parents he works for the government and is going out with Betsy. Insert cuckoo clock mix with merry go round music here.

The craziest part of me is pretty much exactly like Travis. If I didn’t have a lot more happening in this slow cooker brain of mine, I would be him. But I have walls of common sense and pragmatism and a deep fear of the deep end. I have felt like insanity was a hair’s breadth away since I was a teenager. So I am… vigilant.

Jesus. Matthew/Sport the pimp is fucking Satan, he is so good at manipulating Iris and presumably the rest of his girls.

Aw shit. We are at the “my whole life had been leading up to this moment, I see that now” stage of the pathology. That’s pretty much it. Nothing in himself will stop him.

It disturbs me that I am sort of rooting for him to kill Pallantine. I don’t even known his politics. He just seems like such a total scumbag that it seems less than totally tragic that he might die. Take that, you smug son of a bitch.

I don’t even know who I am any more. But at least I am moving forward. It’s getting to the point where I don’t even care who I end up being as long as I grow the hell up already.

I’ll deal with what happens when it happens. I’ll steer this canoe as best I can, but I don’t know where I will end up. I just know it’s got to be better than where I’ve been. Or at least different.

The music during the ending orgy of violence seems way over the top and yet too ornate for the gritty setting as well. No harp glissando, no matter how dramatic, is going to cover a shootout at an inner city underage whorehouse.

Yeah, this whole ending bit, panning over the whole crime scene, is total bullshit. Melodramatic crap. What the hell, Scorsese? The rest of the movie is so good. WTF was that?

And now…. he’s back on the street driving a taxi after gunning down three people in cold blood? I don’t think so. I guess I am supposed to think he told everyone they shot first?

Ayup. This movie totally jumped the shark for me right after he pointed his finger at his head and pretended to blow himself away in front of the cops. Everything after that is crap. Movie should have ended right there.

Still, it was mostly a very awesome movie, and I feel I have continued my cultural education by watching it.

Weird Al and the eternal question

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Weird Al, in his role as hard-hitting journalist, tries to get the answer to one of the most vexing and perplexing questions in all of comedy straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

Sadly, the creature in question completely refuses to divulge his motives, and so the question will remain unanswered for now.

And Al pleads so pathetically and earnestly, how can that little prick resist? All it would take is a few words from that little cock’s beak and we would finally have an actual answer to the burning question of chick road crossing motivation.

But no. He says nothing…. NOTHING! It must be some kind of global chicken conspiracy to keep their true motivations for crossing roads a secret in order to use that diabolically clever asymmetry of information as a crucial “edge” to use when they finally unleash their mighty armies of giant mutant killer chickens to peck us all into oblivion under the blood soaked banner of a rooster known ominously as… The Colonel.

It’s the only logical explanation.

On human reality

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One of the longest lived struggles in philosophy is the one between objective versus subjective reality. Is there such a thing as true objective reality that exists entirely outside our minds, or could we all be just brains in vats, experiencing nothing real?

As with a lot of these ancient dualities, the answer lies somewhere in between, and is invisible to those who are mired in an excessively either/or a/b binary mindset.

We are all, truly, brains in vats, experiencing nothing like pure objective reality. It’s just that those vats are our skulls, and through said skulls, connect to the rest of our bodies and hence to the world.

Objective reality, or at the very least a highly reliable and remarkably durable and convincing illusion thereof, does indeed exist. But there is no way to experience it “directly”. The question itself is meaningless, What would experiencing it directly mean? No matter whether your mental inputs come from the usual five senses, mental telepathy, or the whispers of angels directly into your neocortex, they are being mitigated by your senses. That’s what senses are. They sense things. So all the rationalist folderol about “pure reason” outside the senses is just so much nonsense. There is but solipsism, or senses.

In fact, despite the rationalists’ pooh-poohing of them, the senses themselves cannot be in error. They are mindless, mere machines, and can no more make an error than a bedspread. Only the mind, the realm of “pure reason”, can make a mistake, because it is only in interpretation of the input from the senses that error can occur. A machine like the senses might be broken. But it cannot be ‘wrong’.

But it is clear to any even casually active observer of the human condition that we human beings have a lot more going on than just sensing objective reality. We have rich and complex inner lives filled with all the thoughts, emotions, ideas, memories, and other vital and inevitable functions of the sentient mind hard at work dealing with its own complex subroutines, and in between this inner world and the outer objective world there is often a great deal of tension, a tension that sometimes leads to error when we get confused as to what exactly belongs to each world.

This is the human dilemma, and the result is what I call human reality. Neither entirely objective or entirely subjective, neither wholly white nor completely black, we instead live in the thin, taut layer of existence that is formed by the tension between outer and inner worlds.

We call the resultant state “consciousness”.

Because neither force is ever entirely dominant except in the cases of the catatonically insane or the very intellectual impaired, the human lot is a complex and manifold one. The difference between what we think about something and the thing unto itself can be subtle indeed, and because we ourselves shape the very tools we use to parse the input from our senses and our inner lives, we are quite capable of developing a mental apparatus that is completely incapable of perceiving those things we desire the most.

The truth, then, of the objective versus subjective debate is both more complex and in many ways more tragic than the binary alternatives would suggest. Regardless of any objective or universal truth, no matter how solid and durable the reality of reality might be, we will always be suspended between it and out own complex inner lives.

It is the price of sentience. A subsentient animal might live entirely in the world of its immediate senses and instincts, with no inner conflicts to plague it or doubts to make it hesitate. But it will never know it.

And even if we were nothing but consciousness in the void, we would still be constrained by the limits of the very structure of our minds. The very formation of consciousness itself involves certain choices which are both unavoidable and limiting. The unbound mind simply does not and cannot exist.

So let us resolve to abandon this fruitless talk of objective and subjective reality, and the juvenile dickering and bickering over which one is “better” or “more real”.

Because no matter what we conclude, no matter how elaborate or clever our sophistry or devastating and witty our rationalist putdowns might become, at the end of the day, we will still be living in same mishmash of inner life and outer world we have always lived in.

It’s the only reality available to us : human reality.

And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can move on.