Hippies vs. Punks: Taxi Driver (1976), Pt. 2, a Fresh Appraisal

A few weekends back I saw Taxi Driver again. It had probably been three years since the last time I saw it. I decided on another viewing because recently I've been interested in the Arthur Bremer angle. Taxi Driver's screenwriter, Paul Schrader, is said to have come up with the idea for the movie based on Bremer's An Assassin's Diary.

None of the stuff I've read or the interviews I've seen mention An Assassin's Diary other than in passing. For instance, in an early 1980s interview with Paul Schrader about Taxi Driver there is zero mention of source material for the movie. In fact, Scorsese himself is unclear. In Scorsese on Scorsese (1996), edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie, Scorsese says "I never read any of Paul's source materials -- I believe one was Arthur Bremer's diary." Scorsese then goes on to say how his literary guide for the movie was Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground (1864). On Friday I speculated that Gore Vidal's New York Review of Books essay on the writings of E. Howard Hunt influenced Paul Schrader more than Bremer's An Assassin's Diary.

In any event, let's get to the movie itself, and why I think it represents Hippies vs. Punks ground zero. But before we embark, let me say a few words about when the movie premiered the winter of 1976. I was a sixth grader living in the Santa Cruz Mountains where my father's attempt to establish a communal-living situation/alternative school at an old Jesuit summer retreat was beginning to founder. I had a television in my dormitory room. Each room was self-contained with its own front door; the door opened to a wooden colonnaded walkway; the dormitory was in the same building as the communal kitchen and dining hall, but one floor below; the entire structure was built on a hill and the hill climbed upward until it disappeared into the forest above. (For an ambiance piece on the Santa Cruz Mountains, see the post on Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life.)

I remember Taxi Driver was favorably reviewed with plentiful excerpts on television. And the overwhelming feeling I got as a kid watching those reviews and advertisements was one of fear. Here was a heavily armed skinny madman with a mohawk in an old fatigue jacket gunning people down in a city that looked like a real city. Taxi Driver scared the shit out of people.

I can't recall when I first saw Taxi Driver, if it was on television or at the movie theater. My parents took me to everything regardless of the rating (my mother took me and my sisters to see Bergman's Cries and Whispers), but I don't remember seeing it during its initial release. I do remember when I saw a new print of the film at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, which must have been to celebrate the 10th anniversary.

My takeaway from that viewing was how indebted the final shootout scene in the brothel is to Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). And it's not just the yellow wash. Scorsese says that the rating agency insisted on desaturating the color to de-emphasize all the blood; this, according to Scorsese, ended up making the shootout even more lurid and horrific. (I think he's right.) But also there is something Scorsese does, which is subtle, when Bickle and the mafioso, whose blowjob from Iris is interrupted, have their gun battle. After the mafioso has been hit, Scorsese briefly speeds up the motion and mutes the sound, which is something Hooper did to accentuate the terror and violence of Leatherface's chainsaw attacks. (I noticed during my latest viewing that at the beginning of Taxi Driver Bickle drives by a movie theater with TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE on its marquee. Scorsese doffing his cap.)

Remember, it's fear that powers the counterrevolution to the 1960s. Fear of integration with blacks (anti-civil rights movement). Fear of sexuality (anti-black, anti-Hippie, anti-gay, anti-feminist). Fear of drugs (anti-Hippie, anti-black).

Sit down and watch Taxi Driver again and you will be stunned by its over-the-top racism and negrophobia. This would have been even more explicit if Scorsese had actually followed Schrader's script. Schrader had Jody Foster's character, the 12-and-a-half-year-old Iris, managed by blacks: Sport, the pimp, Harvey Keitel's character, was supposed to be black, as were the crime boss and brothel owner. Scorsese re-imagined the pimp as a streetwise Hippie; the crime boss and brothel owner, Italian mafia.

Quentin Tarantino points some of this out in his eight-minute review of Taxi Driver; he argues that the film is a success because of Keitel's performance. It would have been easy, Tarantino says, to botch that role, a theatrical version of Pat Boone sings rhythm & blues. But Keitel knocks it out the park. (My first viewings of the film as a boy and then college student I was absolutely mesmerized and terrified by Keitel.)

Tarantino defends the picture against charges of racism by saying that Travis Bickle doesn't actually kill any black people. This is not true. Bickle guns down a black guy who is robbing a convenience store. Bickle comes up behind the robber and shoots him. The store owner then proceeds to club with a length of pipe the mortally wounded thief. This is the scene that made a lasting impression on me when I first saw the movie. I had never seen anything like it. It was so violent, so real. Watch it again. It holds up to this day. Notice how the store owner refers to the scene as "Fucking Mau Mau Land."

It doesn't stop there. There is the scene when Bickle exchanges a threatening stare with a black youth using a golf club as a walking stick. There is Bickle's intimidating fellow cab driver, a big black guy in a dashiki who points his finger at De Niro like it's a gun. The whole picture screams negrophobia.

Then there is Bickle's background as a Marine. When I first saw Taxi Driver I assumed that Bickle was just an insane pretender who might not actually have any military experience. Seeing the movie again, it is clear that both Scorsese and Schrader intend Bickle to be not only a real Marine but a combat veteran. Scorsese got the idea for De Niro's mohawk by talking to a Vietnam vet; it is something, Scorsese was told, that soldiers did to say, "Don't fuck with me. I'm going into combat and am preparing to die." In 1975 when Taxi Driver was shot Saigon had just fallen.

The mohawk would become a Punk mainstay thanks to De Niro, as would the plaid shirts that Bickle wears. (De Niro did research at a military base in Northern Italy.) In seeing Taxi Driver again, what really struck me is how much Travis Bickle and his evolving hairstyles look like the Punks -- Television, Talking Heads, Richard Hell -- performing at CBGBs that same summer.

We'll conclude with part 3 and a look Bernard Herrmann, the Hollywood legend who scored Taxi Driver and was known for his work with Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Also, we'll attempt another helicopter landing at Hippies vs. Punks ground zero and try to answer the how and why Punks were used to wipe out the Hippies.

Hippies vs. Punks: Taxi Driver (1976), Pt. 1, Arthur Bremer's An Assassin's Diary

Why are we here at Taxi Driver? It started last month by discovering a used copy of Devo's last big album, Oh, No! It's Devo (1982). One song, "I Desire," is written by John Hinkley, Jr. I had forgotten about John Hinkley, Jr. He was a forlorn figure that personified the first years of the 1980s. Hinkley attempted to murder Ronald Reagan because Hinckley was living out his obsession with Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Hinckley imagined himself as Robert De Niro's character in the film, Travis Bickle, a disturbed ex-Marine and presidential-candidate stalker who, in a bloody shootout, rescues Jody Foster's character, Iris, from a life of street prostitution.

Wednesday it was announced (Gardiner Harris, "John Hinckley, Who Tried to Kill Reagan, Will Be Released") that Hinckley will be released after 35 years in confinement:

Mr. Hinckley was once psychotic and depressed. After seeing the 1976 film “Taxi Driver,” in which a disturbed man plots to assassinate a presidential candidate, he became fixated on Jodie Foster, who played a child prostitute in the film.

Mr. Hinckley began to identify with the main character in the film, Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro.

After Ms. Foster entered Yale University, Mr. Hinckley moved to New Haven to be close to her and left notes, letters and poems at her dormitory. Failing to win her affections, Mr. Hinckley stalked President Jimmy Carter and was eventually arrested on firearms charges. After the 1980 election, Mr. Hinckley stalked the newly elected President Reagan in an attempt to impress Ms. Foster.

On March 30, 1981, after more unsuccessful trips to New Haven, Mr. Hinckley wrote a letter to Ms. Foster describing his plan to kill Reagan. He waited outside the Washington Hilton Hotel for Reagan to arrive and waved at the president as he went inside to deliver a speech.

Forty minutes later, when Reagan emerged from the hotel, Mr. Hinckley crouched down and fired six shots, hitting four men: Reagan; James S. Brady, the White House press secretary; Timothy J. McCarthy, a Secret Service agent; and Thomas K. Delahanty, a Washington police officer. Mr. Brady sustained permanent brain damage and eventually died from his injuries in 2014.

A jury found Mr. Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity, a decision that shocked the public and lawmakers across the country. He was sent for treatment to St. Elizabeths, a psychiatric hospital in Washington, where he has been confined ever since.

Taxi Driver was written by Paul Schrader who said he was inspired by Arthur Bremer's An Assassin's Diary (1973). Arthur Bremer shot and paralyzed George Wallace in 1972, ending the Alabama Governor's aspirations for a national political career. There is very little in common between the screenplay and the Bremer book, other than the narrative convention of a young man recording his thoughts in a journal.

This past Sunday I finished reading An Assassin's Diary, and I was blown away by what an obvious fraud it is. There is no way an unemployed 21-year-old Milwaukee busboy could have written An Assassin's Diary. Absolutely no way. Anyone who has toiled with letters will reach the same conclusion; Gore Vidal did in a 1973 New York Review of Books essay, "The Art and Arts of E. Howard Hunt."

This sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to understand why there hasn't there been more of a hullabaloo over such an obvious fraud. Bremer crippled the man who is responsible for the birth of the present-day Republican Party. Kevin Phillips designed Nixon's Southern Strategy to co-opt Wallace's nascent third-party juggernaut American Independent Party. In 1968 Wallace had run one of the most successful third-party presidential campaigns in the history of the United States, winning five states.

Wallace relied on two things to garner support: negrophobia and Hippie-bashing. Wallace also pioneered the demonization of the Washington bureaucrat. But his overwhelming appeal to voters was based on skewering the negro and the longhair.

Wallace was running strong again in 1972, when, on May 15, Bremer shot and crippled the Alabaman at a shopping center campaign rally in Laurel, Maryland. Nixon went on to trounce McGovern in one of the greatest electoral routs ever.

It goes without saying that Nixon benefited by Wallace sitting out the election in a hospital bed. Many feel that the 113-page diary found in Bremer's '67 Rambler after the shooting, presumably the manuscript Harper's Magazine Press published as An Assassin's Diary in 1973 (portions of which first appeared in the January 1973 issue of Harper's Magazine), was written and planted by the White House Plumbers in order to convince the public that Bremer's original target was Nixon not Wallace. That is why the most developed passages of An Assassin's Diary are those that describe Bremer's trip to Ottawa to kill Nixon, who was on a state visit to the seat of Canadian government.

If people believed that Bremer originally meant to kill Nixon then they wouldn't suspect that Bremer was a Nixon agent or dupe. The Ottawa passage convinced me that An Assassin's Diary is ghost written. (Vidal argued that there are too many literary references for a high school graduate who only had pornography and comic books in his apartment when it was searched; also, there is too deft a utilization of potboiler conventions, such as front-loading a sex scene, to be the work of an amateur.) The book has been heavily edited. Misspellings are used as camouflage to obscure a skillful professional pen at work. Complicated action flows precisely. Street names are used. The writing is done decorously except for all those ludicrous misspellings. If you kept a journal when you were in your early 20s, as I did, you are aware that it was nothing like the powerful economy of An Assassin's Diary.

Let's take a look. Here is a passage, pages 70 and 71, from An Assassin's Diary. Bremer has just arrived in Ottawa, and he is waiting alongside the road near a military base for Nixon's motorcade to pass. He is considering trying to get a shot off.

It was a long wait. 40 minutes at least, maybe over an hour. Some cops on bikes roared by people got out of their cars & went to the curbless, sidewalk less road. I joined in.

False alarm. Stayed out of the car 10 minutes, fingers got nume. That wouldn't do. I went back in & turned the heater on, still listening to the radio for news flashes. Earlier, I had seen the emty President's Lincoln Continental & all his cops & cars going in to the Uplands base. Against ten-of-thousands of people & tens-of-millions of dollars . . . 

I had worn a 3 inch "Vote Republican" button & a 3 inch "Richard Nixon (with his picture)" button to watch the motorcade. I exchanged looks at Mr. Moustache, my gun inside my pocket. Fantasied killing Nixon while shooting right over the shoulder of that cop.

Came out & went inside again. Longjohn weather. I was conscience of my hands. Didn't want to keep them inside of my pockets & get searched. Didn't want to keep them out & nume them too much.

Some folks there kept their hands in their pockets almost all the time, they weren't questioned & either was I. But I wanted to be careful, didn't know if a stop & frisk law existensed or what my rights were as an American here. Felt added confidence with my suit on & short hair & shave.

Didn't recognize my self clean shaven at first. My head hair came in nice & thick.

People jumped from their cars. Would the assassin get a good view? Everyone moved in close (about 20 people). We were the only people other than the cops for a few blocks.

He went by befor I knew it. Like a snap of the fingers. A dark shillowet, waving, rushed by in the large dark car. "All over", someone said to no one in particular. The following cop cars had 2 antentenas each & probaly walkie-talkies too -- jam proof communications. Umbrella in one hand, pocket in the other, I walked back to my car. I had missed him that day. The best day to make the attempt was over, I thought.

Sort of Jack Kerouac's Doctor Sax in Papa Hemingway's prose banged out on Mickey Spillane's manual typewriter. No way, no how written by a young dude with a semester of technical college. There are plenty of red flags -- reference to stop-and-frisk laws and jam-free communications; the use of synecdoche, "Mr. Moustache" -- that point to someone much older and more experienced. Most likely a middle-aged cognac-drinking operative penned this journal. The biggest tell is the management of the scene's action, which is complex, complete with backshadowing -- "Earlier, I had seen the emty President's Lincoln Continental & all his cops & cars going in to the Uplands base." -- and foreshadowing -- "I went back in & turned the heater on, still listening to the radio for news flashes."

Compare it to my own journal entry, written when I was 24, three years older than Bremer, after six years at Cal Berkeley, four of which had been spent working as an assistant instructor teaching reading and composition. I am writing about a winter cross-country trip I made from New York City to California in a VW bus:

Spent the night in a Pennsylvania (name of town now forgotten); it must've been Northeastern. I pulled off the highway, which ran through this town. My feet were pretty well without feeling. I parked the car next to this old shutdown warehouse and went out to take a piss. It was really cold. The wind was dark and howlin'. The wind was blowing through the cracks in the bus. I unfurled my bedding. My feet were wet and as cold as ice.

I'll never have that freedom again. Driving in the sunset; pointing my nose west; the world was on fire and yellow. It was golden and I couldn't see anything, but I could see enough. Hours driven this way. Hours driven alone without the radio.

Got to California. Oil snakes on the road. Drove miles this way. Big brown and red snakes crawling along with me. I slept a few miles out of Barstow with the truckers; the old bus; I didn't put my blanket over me, and I woke up almost frozen to death. But I got it out and got it over me.

Okay so there you have it. Twenty-four and still very boyish and childlike. This despite reading plenty of Plato, Hobbes, Defoe, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Hardy et al., as well as possessing a good knowledge of the rules of grammar and punctuation. There is no way I ever could have described the Nixon motorcade scene.

The question then is if Bremer didn't write An Assassin's Diary who did? Besides someone affiliated with Nixon, the only other obvious answer is someone at Harper's. But if Harper's was going to completely rework whatever original manuscript was found in Bremer's Rambler why leave all those misspellings? Obfuscation is the only answer. And if obfuscation is the answer then that points to Nixon.

An Assassin's Diary was the second part of Bremer's journal. The first 148 pages, dated March 1 - April 3, 1972, he buried in Milwaukee; they were discovered in 1980 and are now part of the collection of Reynolds-Finley Historical Library at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Assuming the 113-page source material for An Assassin's Diary is still intact, it would be easy enough to compare the two for inconsistencies. Of course if one was a phony the other one is probably a phony too. But to maintain the fiction, both would have to come from the same pen; otherwise, discrepancies should be noticeable. (There was a Baltimore Sun article from 20 years ago pointing out that Bremer didn't get a fair trial.)

Interestingly, Travis Bickle's famous line from Taxi Driver, "Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets," a sentiment worthy of a Wallace supporter, is not plucked from Bremer's journal but from one of the novels, Angel Eyes (1961), that Howard Hunt wrote under the pseudonym Robert Dietrich. Vidal quotes it in his NYRB essay. The hero of the potboiler, Steve Bentley, talks of Washington, D.C., "with its 'muggers and heroin pushers and the white-slavers and the faggotry . . . . This town needs a purifying rain!' "

Schrader no doubt read Vidal's NYRB piece and purloined that line from Hunt. Did E. Howard contact Schrader after Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or for 1976?

The irony here -- but one that I think is very illuminating -- is that Taxi Driver owes more to the chief of the White House Plumbers than poor little Artie Bremer.

In part 2, we'll look at the film itself and discuss the score of the great Bernard Herrmann.