Magnificent obsession

Paul Schrader, thank God.
On the occasion of the USA Film Festival's 25th anniversary, there could not be a more inspired and appropriate choice to receive the organization's Great Director award than this bookish, bespectacled, 48-year-old auteur. With the possible exception of Martin Scorsese, no working American director in his age group better illustrates the tension between instinctive talent and absolute self-awareness.

He has worked as a film critic and a magazine editor, and has written countless scholarly and critical articles as well as two influential books of film analysis (one on the works of Carl Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu, and Robert Bresson, and another on film noir). In another life, he could have been a great film critic, or the kind of legendary college professor who inspires fellow students who cross paths years after graduation to hug each other giddily and sing his praises. The depth of his education--not just in film, but in literature, music, history, philosophy, art, and theology--is so intimidating that if he didn't look and talk like Elmer Fudd and conduct himself with such humility, even arrogant cinephiles might find him terrifying.

Yet his calling has always been as a provocative and often infuriating film artist. His screenplays (including Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Mosquito Coast, The Last Temptation of Christ, and major, uncredited contributions to Close Encounters) and his directorial efforts (among them Hardcore, American Gigolo, Mishima, and The Comfort of Strangers) inspire many extreme reactions, but indifference is never among them.

He's possibly the most film-schoolish of all the film school-generation directors, a diverse group of Baby Boomers that includes Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Paul Mazursky, and Peter Bogdanovich. They are a part of cinema's ongoing history and a repository of that same history, eager to quote, borrow, and steal from earlier movies, yet longing to make each quotation, borrowing, and theft their own. They want to explain magic to the rest of us, but they dream of retreating to a place in their lives where such explanations are unnecessary. They snack on the Fruit of Knowledge from dawn to dusk, then go to sleep dreaming of a joyous return to the Garden.

Of all the directors listed above, Schrader is almost certainly the smartest--too smart for his own good, some might argue, considering that he's either directed or significantly contributed to more than 20 fascinating American films, yet has rarely broken through to mainstream success. "As a director," writes film scholar David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, "Schrader has placed himself on the edge of the mainstream. He understands commerce very well; he could explain how to make hits. But some perverse, rugged integrity has left his work increasingly hermetic and narrow in its range."

In their thematic concerns--obsessiveness, paranoia, rage, faith, repression, and the anxiety of the outsider longing to fit in but knowing he never can--Schrader's work hews transparently to his own personality and preoccupations. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1946 to strict Dutch Calvinist parents who forbade him to indulge in the secular vice of moviegoing, Schrader quickly began living a secret life, learning about cinema vicariously by reading books, newspapers, and magazines and thinking about the medium constantly. He did not set foot inside a movie theater until he was 18 years old.

Wracked by loneliness, depression, and thoughts of suicide, he later enrolled in film school at UCLA and studied the history and technique of cinema with monklike devotion. In 1974, the scholar crossed through the looking glass when his script for the Japanese-themed gangster picture The Yakuza, cowritten with his brother, Leonard, was sold for a then-record $500,000 and turned into a vehicle for actor Robert Mitchum.

His next screenplay, for Martin Scorsese's movie Taxi Driver, would set the tone for his future work. It was the story of "God's lonely man," Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro), a Vietnam veteran who takes a job driving a hack in New York to deal with his chronic insomnia and nightmares. Driven to the edge by his own internal demons and by his attraction to two women, a child prostitute (Jodie Foster) and a buxom campaign worker (Cybill Shepherd), he fixates on a presidential candidate and becomes obsessed with assassinating him to prove that he is somebody--"a person like other people." Through a stroke of dumb luck, Travis fails in his assassination attempt and ends up expending his rage across town in a whorehouse full of thugs and gangsters. If his original plan had worked, Travis would have been vilified as a homicidal nut case; instead, he is hailed as a righteous vigilante hero.

Although the exact nature of Travis' mania is never explicitly discussed, it seems to stem less from his war experience than from some fuse that blew in childhood and rendered him ill-equipped to connect with his fellow human beings--especially women, who he views as either angels or whores. More than one critic has pointed out that although the film's climactic explosion of violence is played out in graphic, gory slow-motion, in an earlier scene, which sees Travis being rejected by a woman he's trying to talk to on a pay phone, the camera ostentatiously dollies away from his embarrassment and looks down an empty hallway. It is as if the pain of this skinny cabbie's failure to get a girlfriend is more horrible than a close-up look at mass murder. The scene, writes Roger Ebert, "is fascinating because it helps to explain Travis Bickle, and perhaps it goes some way toward explaining one kind of urban violence. Travis has been shut out so systematically, so often, from a piece of the action that eventually he has to hit back somehow."