Matt Tuckey is a writer from Oldham, England. He covers celebrities, night life, Manchester, fitness, creative writing, social media, psychology and events. Some of this may, in some way, help others. Or maybe it'll just entertain you for a while.
A
busy week of reading. The only notable moment was discussing COVID-19
symptoms with Real Housewives of Cheshire's Hanna Miraftab-Kinsella.
Having
written that, I now realise that Mrs Kinsella is not just a WAG
spending her other half's money on the show, but a qualified
cosmetic dentist, not a dissimilar standing to her cosmetic
doctor husband, Martin.
Well, don't I feel like a dickhead.
(Also,
how the hell do you embed Instagram posts in the new Blogger format?
The Legacy Blogger option disappeared over the weekend. This has
annihilated my plans for next month.)
Taxi
Driver and Bringing Out the Dead: these two movies, both by acclaimed
director Martin Scorsese, have a lot in common, despite being made 3
decades apart. They both feature protagonists who drive for a living,
who narrate the story, and in both cases said men are both dealing
with depression, partly due to their jobs.
I
hadn't seen either of these films for way over a decade, long before
I was accepting that I had depression myself. In the years that
followed I did a lot of work to better myself, to handle my
conditions and be a more responsible, comfortable adult: online
reading, book reading, time spent in neuropsychology, counselling and
psychotherapy, not to mention weekly support groups for 3 years. I'm
far from perfect now, but I''m a lot more in control and happy than I
was before I started to make these improvements, back in 2007. I've
no idea when I last saw these two films, prior to last week, but at
the time I was definitely in denial about my mental health issues.
Lockdown-
both national and local, here in Oldham- has given me time to think.
I've been quite level this year, as most things that cause a spike in
anxiety are social situations, and there haven't been any due to
COVID-19 restrictions. I found myself thinking of these films, and of
how I related to them. (By that, I mean being 1 of the 1 in 4 peopleto have a mental health problem in the UK in the past year.
Not, for example, feeling the need to go shoot a pimp and blow his
henchman's fingers off, or total an ambulance mid-emergency-call.)
There
are a number of memorable scenes in both films, but let's start with
Taxi Driver (1976). Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) takes a job as a
New York cabbie to alleviate insomnia, a condition frequently
connected to depression. The job, alas, makes both conditions worse.
Drummer
Gene Palma has a cameo, demonstrating fellow drummer Gene Krupa's
'syncopated style.'
This
scene was sampled in Apollo 440's 1996 song, Krupa.
More
info can be found on New York resident Gene Palma at John Greco's
blog.
Like
in Krupa, Taxi Driver's influence has embedded itself in other parts
of popular culture. Who remembers this scene from Back to the Future
Part III? It was years before I realised where both of these
originated.
A
personal favourite Taxi Driver reference is this gem from Human
Traffic, featuring Danny Dyer (or Moff) on speed,
babbling about his take on the movie.
Trivia
aside, Taxi Driver is a rip-roaring depiction of depression, a bleak,
cutting but addictive portrait of mental illness. The heartfelt music
from Bernard Herrmann leaves one both invigorated and morose.
Hermann
himself had quite the career- he started with Citizen Kane, and
finished the Taxi Driver score before his death in 1975.
Cybill
Shepard is stunning as love interest Betsy, 12-year-old Jodie Foster
is disturbingly believable as child-prostitute Iris and a young
Harvey Keitel delivers a menacing turn as her pimp, Sport. The film's
narration comes in the form of diary entries, which we see Bickle
write and narrate. Many sources including this from Mind
list many beneficial factors of journaling. It's a routine that is
known to help combat depression, but Bickle obviously needed somewhat
more than that for support.
While
Taxi Driver investigated the despair of depression, the crushing
awkwardness and desperation of the condition (it turns out taking a
girl to a dirty movie on a date is a social faux pas- who knew?!),
Bringing Out the Dead (1999) is more a black comedy on the same
theme.
This
time, instead of a taxi driver with depression, we're following
ambulance driver Frank Pierce (Nicholas Cage), who has the same
issues- low mood, insomnia and the grind of New York City wreaking
havoc on his mental health. Not to mention, he's haunted by the
ghosts of patients he couldn't save.
We
see Pierce head out in the ambulance. Instead of a morose,
saxophone-led blues number accompanying the scene, we open to Van
Morrison's TB Sheets, a
morose, harmonica-led blues number about a woman dying of
tuberculosis.
Before long, though, we're charging through New York in
sped-up footage, Pierce manically gripping the steering wheel, while
Combination Of The Two by Big Brother & The Holding Company screams over the scene.
The
main contrast in the films is tone. Taxi Driver: serious, slow,
downbeat. Bringing Out the Dead: comedic, rapid, desperately
optimistic. While Bickle does a lot of wallowing in self-pity before
he goes on the rampage, taking some lives in the process, Pierce
wants the thrill of saving a life. He knows the busier he is, the
more he works, the more likely he is to save that life, and the less
likely he is to stare into his own soul and plunge into the depths of
despair. He knows staying active will keep him afloat.
The
90s and the 70s before them were very different times to each other,
just like they both are to today's world, whether New York City or
elsewhere. These days, more and more companies and organisations have
mental health policies. Both employers would have at least been
handed a leaflet and noticed the symptoms, signposting the
protagonists to services. (It perhaps wouldn't have made quite the
interesting movie. Or would it?)
As
much as Taxi Driver is the better made movie, Bringing Out the Dead
hammers home an important point: address the mental health problem,
but stay busy to survive.
