A Filmmaker in the Epicenter of the Pandemic

While in both Benny’s Video and Videodrome our character’s battle is with himself, but inside the screen, eventually they both become victims to the technology. In The Piano Teacher and Crash the villain is not a screen, but the villain is in all of us. Our desires, our desire to be more than human. While our main character can never defeat that villain, we see them both walk off into the ending credits, and we know the battle will continue. Cache and A History of Violence become our anti-hero, where we are fighting with our past, our true self is revealed and our past becomes another’s vengeance against us.

I don’t think any of us could feel closer to Travis Bickle right now. Feeling that we live in a city, whichever one you live in, that is doing its best, but the best is not enough, while nowhere is safe, and neighbors have become your unwitting enemies. The government cannot be trusted, the news has become a small fragment of a bigger problem of “Fake News”, fake votes, fake ads, fake everything. The only truth is: There is something out there that can kill us all.

“This battle has only begun, we are closer to the men and women of these films than we know…”

What we are witnessing now is the system falling down, where all things add up to zero. Not zero in the empty sense of the word, but “Zero” because we are all facing the same immediate uncertainty. Yes, the advantages to all are laid out – food delivery – errands – the merchants and the bagmen – the ones who are forced to work, and the ones who can afford not to.

This battle has only begun, we are closer to the men and women of these films than we know. Their battle with violence on the screen, has been, and will increasingly become our battle. We will begin to rely more and more on Television, on our phones, on instagram and Facebook. We will watch the movies which make us laugh and cry. These stories tell us about humans, the way life was, before our isolation. Every day we find out more and more about our President’s lies, corruption, and spread of his own kind of virus; the virus of fake news. The fake news that can infect us in ways that pushes us further and further away from the real issues, the real solutions. He wants us to believe the screen is our antidote, the screen is our enemy, and run from the echoes of insanity on the news while embracing him. As Travis Bickle’s fight was against Sport, to save Iris, this was only to avoid Travis’ real battle, the battle within himself.

In America, Travis has been our The Stranger, our Meursault, the man who we could not, and did not know — until now. His symptoms are our symptoms. While the safety nets have fallen from under us, we have to face the reality of how fragile things are, and always have been. Keep our families and loved ones close at all times, hold on to the things that are important. What Travis and Meursault had in common, was that neither had anything to love.