First time on the big screen for me, Scorsese’s first masterpiece, just dripping with grime and sleaze and stank of old garbage baking in the nyc sun. I want a good psychic wash after watching it, Travis Bickle starts cracked and comes to pieces over the course of the film’s running time, a man wanting to lash out but not sure at what or why, this time around Bickle’s racism seems more pronounced, and a firsttimer might think he’s going to go Bernie Getz (and he does!! In a scene I completely forgot about). Everything is a replacement for another woe—Iris as a stand in for Betsy, Scout for Palantine. Low light film stock (and optical crops??) mean the really brutal scenes feel like they’ve been edited in from a grindhouse snuff film. Fantastic final Hermann score, Betsy’s theme rides the line of (incel) romance and porn film, and srsly Cybill Shepherd would make priest kick in a stained glass window, as Chandler once wrote. Yowza.