“I have to find out who the hell I am,” Martin Scorsese told GQ last month as the publicity cranked up for the release of Killers of the Flower Moon and the rerelease of Mean Streets on its 50th anniversary. It’s a fitting quote for the old master. One that seems emblematic of his movies and the people who populate them. Above all, Scorsese’s characters, particularly the men (his films are usually about men) are searching for an answer to that question.
Travis Bickle played by Robert De Niro is perhaps Scorsese’s best known character. “You talkin’ to me,” turns up in adverts and the mohawk, trenchcoat look is a Halloween costume of sorts. He couldn’t live a more mainstream existence; and yet Bickle is dismissed as a loner, an “incel” even. Not a menace to society but an embodiment of everything wrong with it. Bickle doesn’t lack purpose, he is waiting for an ultimate purpose to be handed to him. Just as I suspect many men are, stuck in totally free lives, unable to handle the liberty that comes with being a young man in the big city.
