The Screengrab : john hinckley

Supply Side Film Criticism: How Travis Bickle Saved the Reagan Revolution

Phil Nugent — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver has long been seen as a controversial masterpiece, a searing time capsule of New York City scraping bottom, and a high point in the fashion history of Mohawk haircuts. Now it turns out that on top of all those things, it's also a stealth fighter in the battle to unleash the forces of free market capitalism. This comes from Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate Robert Mundell, who has revealed to the world a theory that might be called wildly speculative and more than a little tasteless--in a word, Screengrabian. It has to do with the infamous effects of the film on John Hinckley, who developed an obsession with Jodie Foster based on her performance in the movie and watched it over and over, immersing himself in the sight of Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle preparing to assassinate a presidential candidate before switching gears and turning his guns on the Foster character's exploiters. Eventually, in the spring of 1981, Hinckley himself shot Ronald Reagan, then less than two months into his presidency.

Here's where it gets good. Although many remember Reagan as having been supernaturally unstoppable during the early years of his presidency, he was already facing major opposition, both in Congress and from the public at large, to parts of his economic plan. But then Hinckley showed up. "According to Mundell," writes the Financial Times of London, "the wave of sympathy for Reagan that was engendered by the assassination attempt deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. Because of this accident of history, the US administered a big fiscal stimulus at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money. This, for Mundell, was vital in creating the era of prosperity that followed." On the basis of this development, Mindell doesn't think that the movie's historical economic importance can be overstated. "Taxi Driver is the most important movie ever made from the standpoint of creating GDP," he's said. "It's the movie that made the Reagan revolution possible. That movie was indirectly responsible for adding between $5trn and $15trn of output to the US economy." At least we think it was indirect. Stay tuned for our next chapter, in which Oliver Stone arrives waving photos of Milton Friedman and Martin Scorsese performing script doctoring chores while crouching in the grassy knoll.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Seven Days Sunday"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The German film Seven Days Sunday marks the feature directing debut of Niels Laupert, a 33-year-old director of TV commercials and music videos. Laupert seizes on the true story of a couple of sixteen-year-old boys whose alienation and general confusion turns them into thrill killers for a night. One thing you can't accuse Laupert of is glamorizing psychopathic violent behavior. The way he tells this story, the two anti-heroes Adam, (Ludwig Trepte, who looks like Seth Cohen from The O.C. after a personality transplant with a woodchuck) and Tommek (played by Martin Kiefer as a scrawny-legged sweeb with a John Hinckley haircut, a tattoo on the side of his neck, and a pathetic smirk that seems intended to come across as threatening), are driven to kill out of sheer boredom, and to really hammer than point home, Laupert overloads the movie with some of the deadliest, most overextended scenes of just sitting the fuck around ever captured on film. (Seven Days Sunday runs eighty minutes and feels at least twice as long.) Martin Kiefer's performance has to be seen to fully appreciate just how unconvincing an actor playing a supposedly charismatic, dangerous adlescent tempter figure can be. He makes Crispin Glover in River's Edge look like Dr. Mabuse.

Arthur Bremer Killed Jesse James

Peter Smith — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Friday's AP report that Arthur H. Bremer, George Wallace's would-be assassin, was being released after serving 35 years out of his 53-year sentence for good behavior brings out the best in Glenn Kenny, who responds with a curious point you could probably make in the blogosphere without getting angry, ill-informed letters: Bremer's the biggest pop culture influence you never thought about. "Paul Schrader's revelations about the creation of the screenplay of Taxi Driver show us that the screenplay and, by extension, the film, would never have existed had not Schrader melded his own personal torment with the diaries of Bremer," Kenny notes, going on to draw out how that, in turn, might have inspired John Hinckley's far more warped, Jodie Foster-worshipping attempt on Reagan — and how Bremer is probably unaware of how his attempt (generally remembered after successful assassinations on more beloved types like Robert Kennedy and MLK) has warped the culture. I'd go Kenny one better — without Bremer and Hinckley, we lose the assassin-as-scorned-fan template. If you haven't seen The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford yet, now might be a good time. — Vadim Rizov