It's an odd pleasure listening to the commentary track on the Criterion laserdisc edition of Taxi Driver. Recorded when Goodfellas was Scorsese's "new film," the commentary is neatly organized, with Scorsese and Schrader introduced and re-introduced by the stoic moderator, who summarizes their careers intermittently. There is a formal, ritualistic feel to this recording, especially in contrast to the casual, rambling, even dogpile commentaries we get these days (I mean, why does Soderbergh insist on over-playing the role of sycophant on commentaries which should be the exclusive domain of, say, Boorman?). This Taxi Driver commentary is a relic from an era when such a thing was a novelty, and at this point it seems downright arcane. (It's worth noting that Criterion never released a DVD version of Taxi Driver, and the otherwise tricked-out DVD which does exist has no commentary track.)

Anyway, I have never much cared for Taxi Driver. I find the characters and situations archetypal to the point of cartoonishness. Alienation--lonely characters in tight spaces, wrestling with identity, subdued by poverty--is relatively easy to do in cinema (take a look at Hamsun's Hunger or Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and you'll see how difficult it is to do it in a novel), but even so, Taxi Driver doesn't do it particularly well. First of all, why is DeNiro encouraged to fill the spaces which are meant to swallow him? The Dardenne brothers seem to have a fuller toolbox for this sort of operation. Rosetta--I kneel. Having developed the most evocative devices to express alienation and spiritual dyspepsia, the Dardennes may want to go over Taxi Driver and explain how it should have been done: you need handheld here, rather than a tripod; you need a dank Belgian trailer park instead of Manhattan; you need Emilie Dequenne, a beleaguered adolescent non-actor, rather than the scenery-chewing DeNiro hot off an Oscar-winning performance; and--mon Dieu!--you need more ACTION and BROODING and less TALK. From the cloyingly explanatory voice-over to the direct dialogue ("Let me take you away from all this"), Taxi Driver makes the mistake of unalienating its protagonist by dragging him through more conversation than one might expect in a Jane Austen novel.

Schrader's Light Sleeper recycles the underworld ambience of Taxi Driver and many of the same themes (adding one heaping spoonful of Bresson) and achieves something much more carefully modulated, with characters that are far more dynamic and engaging. Though the film is flawed (the overbearing "moody" soundtrack comes to mind, and the voice-over is still with us), the writing is simply more grown up, and every supporting role is sharper than its counterpart in Taxi Driver. Susan Sarandon's superannuated-sorority-girl embodiment of the prolonged entrepreneurial spasm--narcotics, cosmetics, whatever--makes Harvey Keitel's pimp look like a wooden B-movie walk-on. (Keitel tried to find a white pimp to style himself after, but the implication on the commentary is that pimps in New York City were exclusively black at the time--what a gaffe!) Of the three artists most directly responsible for Taxi Driver--Schrader, Scorsese, DeNiro--Schrader is most at fault for its shortcomings. The writing is juvenile, the dramaturgy too starched--the visible scaffolding of the three-act structure obscures the potential stink of authenticity. It's too careful. Schrader was not sufficiently complicated at the time (it was his second script) to give depth to this monumental bleakness--just as there are comedies which insult one with their lack of sophistication (foregoing the legacy of Sturges and Lubitsch), there are dark films which exude darkness without demonstrating how it operates, showing its gears. But Schrader got better--way better. Auto-Focus is one of the most amoral mundanity-of-evil films to be made by a mainstream American director with a name cast. And Schrader's damning but somehow heartbreaking study of alpha-male posturing in Mishima is flat-out brilliant.

Of course, Schrader, Scorsese and DeNiro had plenty more where Taxi Driver came from: Raging Bull is immensely superior in its depiction of the vicissitudes of madness, a sort of heightening by dampening. Yeah, guns and prostitutes and porn make for a shocking frappe, but compared to Raging Bull, Taxi Driver spends a lot of time in neutral; it relents. DeNiro's improvised "Are you talking to me?" gun-slinging routine is proven to be camp when the sustained fists-and-slurs menace of his Jake LaMotta fills the screen. Raging Bull is more convincing not because its characters purport to be based on "real people," but the opposite, as if the pretext of biography freed Schrader, Scorsese and DeNiro from the trappings of making a movie, allowing each of them to erupt through the preconceived notions of their respective crafts.

As I near completion of a rough cut of Canary, I can’t shake the ghost of Taxi Driver. Canary revealed itself as metaphorical autobiography when I pored over the footage to find the plot and the characters; Taxi Driver began as metaphorical autobiography. On the commentary, Schrader discusses the inspiration for the script: he was living in his car and "driving around;" he went to the hospital and realized he hadn't talked to anyone in three weeks; he was living in a nightmarish world that he had invented; he tried to find a plot that adhered to his psychological reality; he took the theme and ran it through the metaphor. In short, he had quite a handle on what he was going through and found a good way to talk about it. Scorsese makes the distinction that whereas Schrader could articulate these sensations, Scorsese himself couldn't--he had to make images instead. Their whole collaboration was so rational and reasonable. I don't object; I simply don't relate. I feel strongly, despite my hyperverbal proclivities, that I could not express the themes of Canary in words--I didn't even catch their scent until I was well into the editing stage. (As we were driving to meet other cast members, Jeffrey said, "You know the line: there's the movie you write, the movie you shoot, and the movie you edit. Seems like you want to skip those first two stages altogether.") As Kieslowski said of The Double Life of Veronique, to talk about what it's "about" would only make it seem stupid and trivial. Why verbalize things which are being dealt with non-verbally for the very reason that they resist verbalization? And I think that's the problem with Taxi Driver--Schrader was acutely aware of what he was experiencing in the period during which he wrote the script, so the metaphors are clear-cut, the themes are large and amenable to discussion. It doesn't strain us, doesn't challenge us, no matter how unsavory it may be.

Alienation spills over from Around the Bay and into Canary. Forty minutes into the earlier film, I released Daisy--released her into the arms of a caring, sensitive older man. I alleviated her alienation, her self-abstraction, even if only temporarily. And for many viewers this scene is pivotal, even their "favorite," because that release is so palpable. Katherine Celio, as Daisy, was asked to carry all my alienation, pound-for-pound, a channel, a surrogate, a martyr-for-hire. But Carla...here is a character both homeless and nameless, outfitted in white, burdened with the concentrated alienation of all of humanity. Now the eyes are more vacant; the close-ups are closer; the quietness is quieter; and the walls of her domicile are tighter, as we shift from a cramped guest house to--what else?--the back of a cargo van.

Canary will not relent.