Some of the echo has to be coincidental Joker premiered in August 2019, months after Reeves’s tweet, though The Batman started shooting the following January. Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy are two sides of a story that Joker doesn’t get (This is, of course, kind of hilarious, given Gotham has a Batman and a Catwoman and a Penguin and all the rest of it.) Like Bickle, Fleck is frequently delusional the version of events we see in the film is his alone, and he’s lost his grasp on reality.Īnd at times it feels like The Batman is a quiet poke in Joker’s direction. In its early moments, a beefy gun-wielding character named Randall warns future Joker Arthur Fleck that there are “animals” all over the city, meaning the kids who menace the streets. That movie is explicitly built on Taxi Driver, mixed with Scorsese’s pitch-black 1982 The King of Comedy. Watching the opening moments of The Batman, it’s hard not to catch the rhyme it seems to purposefully construct with another film about a journaling sad man in Gotham: Joker, Todd Phillips’s 2019 film about Batman’s most iconic adversary. Like Bickle, he thinks he wants to save people from the muck of Gotham’s moral mess.īut he isn’t the only recent character in this world with a strong Bickle resemblance. Like Bickle, he’s carrying around trauma and anger. Like Bickle, Batman, played in this iteration by Robert Pattinson (who Reeves told Esquire was like “a Batman Kurt Cobain”), narrates from his own journal about his sense of alienation from the world, his worry that he’s not doing anything of worth. They’re not the same movie, but there are Taxi Driver fingerprints all over The Batman (though it was ultimately Nirvana’s “ Something in the Way” that made it prominently onto the soundtrack). His paranoid fantasies explode into actual violence, and we’re left with Taxi Driver’s uncomfortable moral quandary: When we’re tempted to make a hateful misogynist killer a folk hero, what does it say about us? But though he thinks he’s an existential hero, a self-styled vigilante cleaning up a dirty city, his violent streak emerges when he’s rejected by the women he tries to rescue, women who don’t want anything to do with him. He’s a profoundly delusional misanthrope who first presents as a man obsessed with morality. Columbia Picturesīickle is not a hero, and Scorsese’s neo-noir masterpiece, with a screenplay by Paul Schrader, knows it. “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. “All the animals come out at night,” he says as he drives down the street in his taxi, naming off all kinds of people he deems lowlifes, from junkies to “fairies” and it gets worse from there. In Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, it plays early beneath the voice of protagonist Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a Vietnam vet and cab driver who is writing in his journal about how grateful he is for the rain that washes the scum off New York’s streets. “Thank God for the Rain” is a 1:41 track, entirely instrumental, composed by Bernard Herrmann. “‘Thank God for the Rain’ from the Taxi Driver soundtrack,” Reeves tweeted back. In March 2019, a fan tweeted at director Matt Reeves, asking him what he was listening to while writing The Batman. Click here to read Variety’s full interview with Reeves.Funny how a good plant and a noxious weed can spring up in the same soil. “The Batman” is now playing in theaters nationwide. It also isn’t impossible that there is some story that comes back where Joker comes into our world.” There are things we’ve talked about there. “There’s stuff I’m very interested in doing in an Arkham space, potentially for HBO Max. “There might be places,” Reeves told Variety in the same interview. Reeves told IGN that a reference point for Keoghan’s Joker was David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man.” Now that Keoghan’s Joker has been revealed more fully, courtesy of the deleted scene, will this iteration of the Crown Prince return in the future? Even as a child, people looked at him with horror, and his response was to say, ‘Okay, so a joke was played on me,’ and this was his nihilistic take on the world.” “What if this guy from birth had this disease and he was cursed? He had this smile that people stared at that was grotesque and terrifying. “It’s not about some version where he falls into a vat of chemicals and his face is distorted, or what Nolan did, where there’s some mystery to how he got these scars carved into his face,” Reeves added. His face is half-covered through most of the film.” “He has a congenital disease where he can’t stop smiling and it’s horrific. “It’s like ‘Phantom of the Opera,’” Reeves said in the interview.
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