5Finding Meaning

‘All the animals come out at night: whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies. It's sick. Venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.’

For movie portrayals of the outsider, few can beat Martin Scorsese's 1976 classic Taxi Driver. Failing to cope with his post-Vietnam stress, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) takes a job as a night-time New York cabbie. Yet, rather than cure his insomnia, his nocturnal ferrying of the city's low-life fuels his anger at the immoral cesspit beyond his window, hence the quote above as he contemplates a rainy night in a seedy Times Square.

A generation on from Holden Caulfield's forlorn wanderings and Manhattan's descended into a dystopian ...

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