Manhattan Adult Entertainment: Six Stories: Salinger Inspired Cinema
Though not one mention of The Catcher in the Rye is uttered in Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece (written by Paul Schrader in an inspired fever), the iconic character of Travis Bickle (so memorably played by Robert De Niro) is viewed by many as the incarnation of the future Holden Caulfield, and one so eerily potent that it was (by no fault of the filmmakers) darkly influential for a future attempted assassination on a president. An intensely troubled man who has nearly lost his mind to obsessive thoughts (brilliantly heard in the picture’s monologist voice over narration), Travis is far more humorless than Holden, but that’s what the harsh reality of growing up in an alienating world (and his own type of insanity, though a relate-able insanity — it’s hard not to identify with Travis at times) has done to him. Wanting to, like Caulfield, protect the younger and more innocent from the world’s exploitation (in Catcher it’s Holden’s young sister Phoebe; in Taxi Driver it’s Jodie Foster’s teenage prostitute, Iris), Tr …