The notion of personal filmmaking took hold in America during the 1970s, with Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets being one of the foremost examples. With an encyclopedic knowledge of film history, which he’s made hay out of recently with Hugo and his lecture works on classical film, Scorsese drew from his fluency in cinematic language as well as his experiences growing up in Little Italy, his exposure to seedy mob characters and devout Catholics. It’s easy to see this movie as just another mafia movie, but that’s only because we’ve all seen The Godfather, The Sopranos, and Goodfellas. Appreciating Mean Streets takes on new meaning when you consider that it was released in 1973.
Taxi Driver shared a certain strength of perspective with Mean Streets, exploring the more complex aspects of the hero/villain dichotomy, a new kind of subjectivity for movies. Anti-heroes seem almost commonplace now in the era of Walter White and Don Draper, which follows Tony Soprano and countless other television and movie figures who were bad guys who we sympathized with, but the novelty of this was strong in the 70s. So putting an audience in the mind of a guy like Travis Bickle, this deranged loner taxi driver living in Manhattan, and on top of that presenting his perspective without the attempt to pass some sort of objective, above-the-fray judgment on his actions and situation, was astonishing. Doing so with the energy Scorsese likes to operate with made for captivating drama, in both these movies.
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