WHY DOES TAXI DRIVER STILL RESONATE?
Another thing [David] Berkowitz shared with his fictional counterpart was that strangely American cult of celebrity that allows its outcasts to become just as famous as its achievers. In the somewhat incongruous happy-ending coda to Taxi Driver, Bickle ends up a hero, finally validated, at least in his own mind, for having cleaned the scum off the streets, while Berkowitz, in turn, would prove far from averse to sharing his story with the outside world. It’s largely thanks to him that 40 US states currently carry so-called Son of Sam – named for Berkowitz’s Labrador-owning neighbor, Sam Carr – laws on their books specifically designed to keep convicts from profiting financially from their crimes.
The other ghastly perversion of Scorsese’s movie came when another pudgy-faced drifter, this one named John Hinckley Jr., became obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster, who famously plays a pre-teen hooker in the film. Like Charles Manson before him, Hinckley was a frustrated folk singer, and, like Berkowitz, another sad advertisement of what can happen when paranoid delusions meet with gun ownership. Over the years, his plan came to revolve around the idea of assassinating the US president in the belief that this might impress the object of his desires. Hinckley wasn’t fussy about which president. In October 1980, he was arrested at Nashville airport with three handguns in his luggage while Jimmy Carter was speaking elsewhere in the city. He was fined $50 and released the same day.
Five months later, Hinckley managed to shoot Carter’s successor in office, Ronald Reagan, outside the Washington Hilton. The attack left Reagan with serious injuries and permanently paralyzed press secretary James Brady. A Secret Service agent and a police officer were also wounded. Jodie Foster was not impressed. So far from being attracted to Hinckley, she’s commented on her reluctance to ever act in live theater lest another deranged fan appear in the audience. Hinckley himself was released after 41 years’ confinement in a psychiatric hospital, and is now attempting to resume his career as a musician and artist, although his reception thus far has not been encouraging from the ranks of either the record industry or the public.
And once again, the WaPo was there! “The man who shot Reagan wants to play concerts. It’s not going well,” the Post reported in 2022:
If he were any other shooter — found not guilty by reason of insanity and later deemed not a danger to himself or others — Hinckley might have been free of the court system years ago, and blending in with his guitar at a New York City club. But his victims included a U.S. president, as well as a press secretary, a D.C. police officer and a Secret Service agent. Many people are not eager to see him enjoy the benefits of a life without court supervision.
The Reagan Foundation opposed lifting Hinckley’s restrictions and his attempt at a music career, saying in a statement that Hinckley “apparently seeks to make a profit from his infamy.” A 2021 op-ed in The Washington Post by Patti Davis, one of Reagan’s daughters, also protested his freedom.
“I don’t believe that John Hinckley feels remorse,” she wrote. “Narcissists rarely do.”
In 2022, we descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Patti Davis was a voice of sanity. But then pretty much everyone was much saner the Washington Post during the last decade. QED:
Why does everyone have to yell and have tantrums in public now? Go get another job like the rest of us.
— Douglas Karr (@douglaskarr) February 6, 2026
As James Lileks wrote of Taxi Driver: “It’s a brilliant movie. The civilization it portrays is a sad and empty place — Weimar Germany without the energy to muster up the brownshirts, Rome that fell because it was grew bored waiting for the Huns. If I had to choose between its 1 hour and 54 minutes of brilliance and the few minutes of Herrman’s score — no question. That sad sax theme alone sums up everything about the latter 70s, its exhaustion, its dead-hearted nostalgia for everything it grew up pissing on. Julia Phillips was one of the movie’s producers. I’ll bet she would have wanted someone to play that theme at her funeral.”
I wonder what Zohran Mamdani thinks about Taxi Driver? Much like Bill de Blasio before him, he seems determined to return New York to its dissipated 1970s-era condition, which made the film imaginable in the first place.