Snap judgement: Japan PM’s electoral landslide

Summary

Economist Podcasts — "Snap judgement: Japan PM’s electoral landslide"

Episode Date: February 9, 2026
Host: Rosie Bloor
Featured Guests: Noah Snyder, Rebecca Jackson, Andrew Miller, Professor Martin Peterson

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Intelligence examines three stories beneath recent headlines:

1. Japan's unexpected snap election landslide for Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae
2. The intensifying battle over academic freedom and free speech in American universities, particularly in Republican-led states
3. The enduring relevance of Martin Scorsese’s 'Taxi Driver' at its 50th anniversary

The conversations offer sharp analysis of political, cultural, and educational shifts in Japan and the United States, before ending with an insightful look at cinema’s relationship with its city.

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Segment 1: Japan’s Electoral Landslide (02:28–10:41)

The Stakes and Significance

• Record-breaking victory: Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae’s LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) wins the largest lower house majority in party history.

  “This is the biggest victory... the biggest margin they’ve had in the lower house of parliament in the entirety of the party’s history.”
  — Noah Snyder (03:11)

• Mandate size: LDP alone now holds 316 out of 465 seats; with its coalition partners, over 350.

How Did Takaichi Pull It Off?

• Personal popularity vs party baggage:
  • Takaichi’s appeal helped the party despite its tarnished reputation.
  • Notable for being Japan’s first female PM.
  • Distinct personal flair: working-class background, plain-spoken style, ex–heavy metal drummer, motorcycle enthusiast.
  • Embraced social media and TV, contrasting with her more traditional male predecessors.
  • Campaign slogan: relentless work ethic — “work, work, work, work, work.”

  “She’s had really long coattails in this election... She speaks in a kind of plain spoken style. She has a bit of panache, a bit of flair. She used to be a heavy metal drummer, she likes riding motorcycles, she’s comfortable on tv, on stage, on the world stage and increasingly on social media.”
  — Noah Snyder (04:03)

The LDP’s Recent Struggles

• Scandals and instability:
  • The LDP had suffered from frequent leadership changes and electoral losses after the resignation of Abe Shinzo in 2020.
  • Coalition instability; party only recently managed a new partner and Takaichi “barely got over the line.”

Opposition in Collapse

• Opposition’s failings and the left’s crisis:

  • The main opposition – the Centrist Reform alliance, a merger of struggling parties – lost over half its seats, creating “a muddle rather than a synergy.”
  • Left-wing parties seem increasingly out of step with voter sentiment, especially given global turbulence and Japan’s need for decisiveness.
  • New “upstart” parties gain, but none approach LDP’s dominance.

  “Like many a merger gone wrong, it was a muddle rather than a synergy... There was an unclear leadership structure, and the party’s core supporters seemed to have abandoned them.”
  — Noah Snyder (06:54)

Takaichi’s Mandate and Next Steps

• Security and economic ambitions:

  • Security: Increased defense spending, bolstering the military, developing a national intelligence apparatus, and strengthening the defense industry (including weapons exports).
  • Economic: “Responsible and proactive” fiscal policy, emphasizing expansionary spending for growth, balanced with market reassurances—amid inflation and interest rate challenges.

  “She’s just been handed a brand new Ducati and being given the keys to take to the open road... So the question is what she chooses to focus on and where she chooses to put her pedal to the metal.”
  — Noah Snyder (08:42)

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Segment 2: Free Speech and Higher Ed in Republican States (12:13–19:29)

The Case Study: Texas A&M and the Ban on Plato’s Symposium

• Syllabus censorship:

  • Professor Martin Peterson was told to remove Plato's Symposium from his readings due to state restrictions on “prohibited content” regarding gender and sexuality.

  “He was told to either nix Plato from the syllabus or be reassigned to teach another class.”
  — Rebecca Jackson (13:23)

• Wider crackdown:

  • New Texas laws restrict DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives and reduce faculty autonomy.
  • Other professors faced canceled classes or firings if they couldn't preemptively account for “controversial” content.

  “Professors across A and M in all different departments are anxious because they've seen the stakes of this kind of crackdown.”
  — Rebecca Jackson (13:52)

Beyond Texas: Nationwide Trend

• In major Texas universities, self-censorship is widespread:

  • 40% of faculty at UT Austin altered syllabi for compliance.
  • Student organizations face new hurdles.

• Broader pattern: 32 states proposed anti–free-speech higher-ed bills in the prior year; 21 passed, now affecting over half the college student population.

  “There’s a drive across Republican run states to legislate what is taught and to punish professors and students who speak of prohibited ideas.”
  — Rebecca Jackson (15:31)

The Political Reversal

• From left to right:

  • Once, most campus speech censorship originated from left-wing efforts against the right; now, 80% comes from the right.
  • Brandon Creighton (Texas Tech chancellor, bill author) argues this is a return to “the center” and that universities are an extension of the state.

• Skepticism of claims:

  • Frederick Hess of the conservative American Enterprise Institute: Recent crackdowns are “dramatic and so absurd” that even courts have intervened.

  “One court struck down a Texas law that attempted to ban on campus expressive activities between 10pm and 8am. The federal judge in that case quipped that the First Amendment does not have a bedtime.”
  — Rebecca Jackson (17:15)

The Stakes for Academic Freedom

• Faculty at a crossroads:

  • Many must choose between compliance or standing up for free speech.
  • Professor Peterson, chair of the Academic Freedom Council, frames his own protest in utilitarian terms.

  “If I can’t speak, who can? I feel I have a moral obligation to do it. And even if it has catastrophic consequences for me... I do it for the greater good.”
  — Prof. Martin Peterson (19:05)

• Responding to censorship:

  • Peterson will skip the unit on Plato but plans dedicated classes on the value of free speech.

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Segment 3: Taxi Driver at 50 — The Enduring (and Disturbing) Appeal (19:49–25:12)

Revisiting the Film

• Andrew Miller reflects on “Taxi Driver” as much more than a symbol of ‘70s New York decay:

  “Released 50 years ago this month, Taxi Driver... routinely ranks among the best films of all time and often tops lists of movies set in New York. It’s revered not only for its depiction of the city, but also the character of Travis Bickle, a cabby turned vigilante...”
  — Andrew Miller (19:56)

The Real Subject: Travis Bickle’s Mind

• The “cesspit” city is less documentary than a projection of Bickle’s paranoia and alienation.

  “If you watch Taxi Driver closely, it's clear that it's less a portrait of a place than of Travis Bickle's febrile perception of it refracted through his rain slicked windscreen and crumbling mind.”
  — Andrew Miller (21:31)

• Bickle as a disturbing modern archetype:

  • Isolated Vietnam vet, resentful and confused, searching for belonging.
  • Finds purpose, power, and a sense of virtue in violence and reactionary politics.
  • Parallel with online “incel” culture and the radicalization of alienated men today.

  “Today, Travis Bickle would find consolation on incel forums. He buffs up his body like an acolyte of the manosphere. And in the end, he seeks redemption in violence. His most loving relationship is with his guns.”
  — Andrew Miller (23:41)

The Ambiguous Legacy

• Society (and viewers) risk misreading the film’s message:
  • Bickle’s violent outburst is celebrated as heroism in-universe, and his misanthropy sometimes adopted as “cool” by fans.

  “These days, the film’s most immortal line, ‘You talking to me?’ tends to get parroted as a slogan of macho bristle, whereas it's actually spoken by a maniac to his own reflection in a slumland bedsit.”
  — Andrew Miller (24:25)

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Notable Quotes

• On Takaichi’s victory:

  "It's a really historic victory, Rosie. It's hard to overstate..."
  — Noah Snyder (03:11)

• On faculty protest:

  "If I can't speak, who can? I feel I have a moral obligation to do it. And even if it has catastrophic consequences for me..."
  — Prof. Martin Peterson (19:05)

• On Taxi Driver’s misunderstood legacy:

  "These days, the film's most immortal line, 'You talking to me?' tends to get parroted as a slogan of macho bristle, whereas it's actually spoken by a maniac to his own reflection..."
  — Andrew Miller (24:25)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Japan’s snap election analysis: 02:28–10:41
• Free speech battles in US universities: 12:13–19:29
• Taxi Driver’s enduring relevance: 19:49–25:12

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Tone and Style

• Analytic, insightful, worldly, with a touch of irony and cultural sharpness (in keeping with The Economist’s voice)
• Speakers use clear, plain-but-evocative language to convey political and cultural nuances

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This episode offers a comprehensive, international snapshot: the transformation of Japanese politics, the contested future of American academic freedom, and the disquieting persistence of cinematic anti-heroes. Both the political landslide and the cultural battle lines are drawn with economist-level clarity and global context.

Transcript

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[Rosie Bloor]

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In the past decade. American universities have become a hunting ground for almost every phase of the culture wars today, free speech and why Republican states seem to have a problem with Plato. And 50 years ago, taxi Driver brought us a mouldering New York and a misfit who raged against the society he couldn't find a way into. No wonder, says our correspondent, that the film still feels so relevant. First up though.

[Noah Snyder]

This weekend Japanese voters braved record breaking snowfall to head to the polls. There they delivered a record breaking victory for Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae, who called this snap election just weeks ago.

[Rosie Bloor]

Noah Snyder is our East Asia Bureau Chief.

[Noah Snyder]

It was a high stakes political gamble and it has paid off big time. The result is set to reshape Japanese politics for years to come.

[Rosie Bloor]

Noah, it was a political gamble. It paid off. Just how significant is this victory for Takaichi and her party?

[Noah Snyder]

It's a really historic victory, Rosie. It's hard to overstate the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which Prime Minister Takaichi heads, has basically dominated Japanese politics since 1955, ruling with only two brief interruptions. And this is the biggest victory. They've won the biggest margin they've had in the lower house of parliament in the entirety of the party's history. So the result is a massive mandate, a supermajority for the LDP on its own. They picked up more than 100 seats in the course of this election and they now control 316 on their own and together with their coalition partners will control over 350 of the 465 seat chamber.

[Rosie Bloor]

As you say, we weren't sure she could do it. So how did Takaichi pull this off?

[Noah Snyder]

The question was always whether Takaichi's personal popularity, which was quite high according to opinion polls, would be enough to bring her less popular party along. And clearly her popularity has proven to be a potent force. She's had really long coattails in this election. Part of it is that she has a personal appeal. She represents change for voters who are eager to see an end to the old way of politics. She's the country's first female Prime Minister. But perhaps more importantly, she comes from a kind of middle class background, a family that could be like the average Japanese voters, rather than from the sort of political dynasties that many of her predecessors hailed from. She speaks in a kind of plain spoken style. She has a bit of panache, a bit of flair. She used to be a heavy metal drummer, she likes riding motorcycles, she's comfortable on tv, on stage, on the world stage and increasingly on social media where again, her predecessors, who are mostly older men, have really, really struggled. And finally she's really put in the work. And I think that's something that resonated with Japanese voters and has resonated since the start of her campaign. The sort of slogan, the catchphrase of her administration has become her pledge to work, work, work, work, work. And she's been taking to repeating that and to really acting on that on the campaign trail, racking up thousands of kilometres, crisscrossing the country and outrunning her rivals.

[Rosie Bloor]

It's easy to see this now as something that was fated to happen almost. But remind us why the LDP's reputation had taken such a hit in recent years.

[Noah Snyder]

That's a really important piece of context for this election. The LDP has long been the dominant party in Japanese politics, going back to its founding in 1955. But in recent years, especially since the resignation of Ms. Takaichi's political mentor, Abe Shinzo in 2020, the party has stumbled. It's gone from one scandal to another, from one short lived Prime Minister to another forgettable Short lived Prime Minister. And in the last two national elections, an upper house contest and a lower house contest, the party took a real drubbing and it had str struggled even to form a governing coalition. So last October, they decided to revive their fortunes by turning to Takaichi. And she came in again leading a very fragile coalition. The old coalition partner ditched the ldp. She had to bring in a new coalition partner, and she really barely got over the line to get confirmed as Prime Minister. So the party was really struggling, certainly by LDP standards.

[Rosie Bloor]

And where does this leave the opposition?

[Noah Snyder]

Well, that's the other big part of this story, Rosie. It's not just about Takaichi's triumph, Takaichi's popularity. It's also about the absolute collapse of the mainstream left of center opposition in Japan. The biggest opposition party heading into this election was the Centrist Reform alliance, which was a kind of a hastily formed merger of two long standing parties, the Constitutional Democratic Party, which was the traditional opposition force, and Comito, which was the LDP's former coalition partner. And this new alliance between the two of them lost more than half of the seats that they had held heading into the election. So like many a merger gone wrong, it was a muddle rather than a synergy. The two parties lost sight of their identities. There was an unclear leadership structure, and the party's core supporters seemed to have abandoned them. We also saw a big drop in support for small left wing parties, suggesting that voters might see their sort of traditional ideological pacifism as out of step with today's turbulent world and that they may trust Takaichi. He has a stronger and more decisive seeming figure to lead Japan in this turbulent moment. We also saw a new kind of trend emerging, or strengthening rather, in this election, which is the rise of upstart political parties. So there were a handful of smaller new parties that picked up seats, but not necessarily necessarily as many as they had hoped, and certainly not as many as they would need to pose anything like a credible threat to the LDP's new grip on power.

[Rosie Bloor]

So what is Takaichi going to do with this big mandate?

[Noah Snyder]

Well, I think it's clear that she wants to move much faster. As I mentioned before, she's a motorcycle enthusiast, and I think that's maybe a good way to think about where Japan is heading now. She's just been handed a brand new Ducati and being given the keys to take to the open road. She has no opposition inside the party left that will challenge her after a victory like this. And no opposition within the parliament that can really stop or slow her ambitions. So the question is what she chooses to focus on and where she chooses to put her pedal to the metal. She has talked about two big sets of policies. One having to do with security, making Japan stronger. So that involves spending more on defense. It involves involves beefing up Japan's armed forces and Japan's sort of defense industry, Japan's security state. So doing things to make it easier for Japanese defense industrial companies to export weapons and thus to sort of build a more sustainable domestic defense industry. It involves things like building out a national intelligence apparatus, which Japan has tended to lack in a post war kind of modern form. And then on the flip side, there's a set of policies related to, to the economy, to making Japan more prosperous, as she puts it. And here she is pursuing what she calls a responsible and proactive fiscal policy. And that may sound a bit like a contradiction because in fact, it is a bit of a contradiction. So she wants to spend big on a host of industries. She wants to sort of really use expansionary fiscal policy to try to drive growth, but she wants to do so in a way that isn't perceived by markets as being irresponsible. And she's doing this, of course, in the context of rising inflation, rising interest rates, and rising questions from investors about the sustainability of these plans. So the question, I think, for Takaichi is whether she can drive faster while staying on course.

[Rosie Bloor]

Noa, thank you very much.

[Noah Snyder]

Thank you for having me.

[Rosie Bloor]

And you can hear more about Japan's economic woes and Takaichi's plans to reshape the economy on Money Talks, our business and finance podcast, which was out last week. You'll need to be a subscriber.

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[Professor Martin Peterson]

So for the next couple of weeks, my aim is to give you a crown course in moral philosophy. We are really interested in the theory.

[Rebecca Jackson]

Recently I had the chance to sit in on a philosophy lecture at Texas A and M University, America's biggest university.

[Rosie Bloor]

Rebecca Jackson is the Economist's Southern correspondent.

[Rebecca Jackson]

It was delivered by Professor Martin Peterson, and as an undergraduate philosophy class, it was pretty par for the course. Utilitarianism, the prisoner's dilemma, the usual fare. But compare the course syllabus to the one that he initially submitted to the university's philosophy department, and you may notice a key difference. One text had vanished from the reading Plato's Symposium. And it's that omission that's recently landed the university in the midst of a media frenzy.

[Professor Martin Peterson]

Oh, someone discussed our class in Washington Post today or in New York Times, and I saw that was an op ed in Wall Street Journal today. Yeah, et cetera, et cetera. That's yeah.

[Rebecca Jackson]

As Professor Peterson explained, this is because Symposium discusses, Among other things, Plato's views on gender and sexuality. His was one of 200 courses said to be under review by the university's administration for prohibited content. He was told to either nix Plato from the syllabus or be reassigned to teach another class.

[Rosie Bloor]

So why did the university ban Plato's work?

[Rebecca Jackson]

This is part of a broader effort by university administrators to try to comply with a slew of harsh new higher education bills that have come out of the Texas state legislature in the past couple of years. Texas politicians have passed laws that ban universities from teaching dei. They overhaul the curriculum, and they give less and less power to faculty to decide what they want to teach. Another professor who I spoke to in the School of Government told me that in the first week of classes this term, his Ethics of Public Service class was canceled because he couldn't tell the dean which days he planned to speak about race and gender. Professors across A and M in all different departments are anxious because they've seen the stakes of this kind of crackdown. In the fall, one professor who was teaching about gender fluidity in a children's literature class was fired by the university after a video of her teaching and came to light in Austin.

[Rosie Bloor]

And is it just Texas A and M or is this a bigger thing?

[Rebecca Jackson]

It's much bigger. Texas A and M is perhaps the starkest example of it. But I also visited University of Texas at Austin, which is the state's flagship school there. 40% of faculty said that last fall they changed their curriculum to try to comply preemptively with the state's laws. I spoke to the president of the University Democrats, a student club there, and she told me that the club now has to jump through hoops to get their outside speakers approved and has to read this disclaimer at the start of every meeting saying that their opinions don't represent the university. This is part of a trend that actually goes far beyond Texas.

[Rosie Bloor]

So what's happening more broadly then?

[Rebecca Jackson]

There's a drive across Republican run states to legislate what is taught and to punish professors and students who speak of prohibited ideas. A new report by a nonprofit called Pen America found that lawmakers in 32 states filed 93 bills last year censoring higher education. 21 of those passed subjecting more than half of America's college students to these policies.

[Rosie Bloor]

We've had a number of years of people trying to monitor other people's speech on campuses. Isn't this just a corrective from the right?

[Rebecca Jackson]

So that's certainly what a lot of conservatives are saying. There were real problems and universities needed to be reformed and that this is the proper way to go about it. But I dove into a database of free speech cases collected by the foundation of Individual Individual Rights and Expression Fire. What they found is that in 2020, most of the attempts to censor student speech on campus involve left wing efforts to curb right wing speech. But in the years since, there's been a striking political reversal. Now as many as 80% of these cases are coming from the right. I put some of this to Brandon Creighton. He's a former state senator in Texas who was the author of many of these bills. And this year he was appointed as the chancellor of Texas Tech University, one of the biggest public university systems in the state. He explained to me that academic freedom is in fact alive and well. He said that campuses across America have been commandeered for decades and if anything, he sees a shift back towards the center. Now, he also explained to me that he sees public universities and as an extension of the state.

[Rosie Bloor]

So what do you make of that assertion that academic freedoms are alive and well?

[Rebecca Jackson]

Rosie? To be honest, I don't find it so compelling. And neither do lots of the researchers and faculty that I spoke with. And even some conservatives who have been fighting against the left wing influence on campuses are pretty shocked by what's going on. Now, one of those people is Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank. For years he has been saying that there need to be real changes on college campuses and that that wokeism has infected the way that we teach and the way that students learn. But he says that the establishment Republicans who have been fighting for reforms have now been crowded out by radicals who are overcorrecting. In some cases, these laws have been so dramatic and so absurd that the courts have had to step in. One court struck down a Texas law that attempted to ban on campus expressive activities between 10pm and 8am the federal judge in that case quipped that the First Amendment does not have a bedtime.

[Rosie Bloor]

So where does that leave academic freedom in American universities, at least in red states?

[Rebecca Jackson]

Rosie I think academic freedom is really at risk right now. If you look at Texas A and M, since we published this article, they have gutted their women and gender studies program entirely. Many academics will now have to decide whether they're going to sit there quietly and adapt in order to comply with these rules or stand up for the cause of free speech. I asked Martin Peterson, the philosophy professor who nixed Plato from his syllabus, where he stood on that question in terms of, you know, poking the bear. Do you not feel that so several.

[Professor Martin Peterson]

People have told me I should stop now. Don't, don't poke the bear too much, et cetera, et cetera. But I guess that is the problem here, that I can keep poking the beer up to a certain point, and when it's too late, it's too late.

[Rebecca Jackson]

You're willing to take the risk.

[Professor Martin Peterson]

I'm the chair of Academic Freedom Council on this campus. If I can't speak, who can? I feel I have a moral obligation to do it. And even if it has catastrophic consequences for me, right. The utilitarian theory. I do it for the greater good.

[Rebecca Jackson]

Come March, he will skip over the unit on Plato, but instead he's planned a two class series on the value of free speech.

[Rosie Bloor]

Becca, thank you so much for talking to me.

[Rebecca Jackson]

Thanks for having me on. Rosie.

[Andrew Miller]

Yes, we're talking to him, or at least about him.

[Rosie Bloor]

Andrew Miller writes our Backstory column on.

[Andrew Miller]

Culture, released 50 years ago this month. Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese's sleazy, highbrow masterpiece, routinely ranks among the best films of all time and often tops lists of movies set in New York. It's revered not only for its depiction of the city, but also the character of Travis Bickle, a cabby turned vigilante, coruscatingly played by Robert De Niro. Half a century on, I think one of these characterizations has held up better than the other. Today's New Yorkers often complain about urban blights like high prices and rats. But watching Taxi Driver really puts that in perspective. There was a sanitation strike when the film was shot in the summer of 1975. And it shows. Unemployment and the murder rate were soaring, the population was shrinking, and New York City in this film is overrun by drunks and druggies, strippers, pimps, child prostitutes and stick up artists. Everything was worse in the 1970s, you might conclude after watching it. Except for the movies now on screen, as in reality, New York contains multitudes. It's the home of moonstruck lovers and greedy financiers, hustlers, mafiosi. It's where Harry romances Sally, King Kong swats a biplane and Superman takes flight. Yet for many movie fans, the cesspit city in Taxi Driver is cinema's supreme version of New York. In a way, I think that's a mistaken way of thinking about the film. Because if you watch Taxi Driver closely, it's clear that it's less a portrait of a place than of Travis Bickle's febrile perception of it refracted through his rain slicked windscreen and crumbling mind. In this film, the shimmery surface of the metropolis is a mirror. Maybe great cities always are. And as for Travers character, while he's a damaged, alienated Vietnam veteran, he's transfixed by what reviles him. He loathes the decadence of the East Village and Times Square, but hangs out in porno cinemas. Above all, he's a loner. The taxi is kind of a symbol of his isolation. It's as if there's a secret to communicating that no one's told Travis. He wants to make friends and court women, but he doesn't know how. One of the shocks in a film that's full of them is a late mention of his parents. He had seemed so irredeemably alone. Travis is a product of his era, but his neuroseason contradictions feel very familiar today too. As for a lot of misfits, politics offers him a jolt of power for his ego and a sheen of virtue for his rage against filth and scum. The politician he fixes on hardly matters. Nor does it really matter whether Travis supports him or plots to assassinate him. Racism and misogyny are outlets for him too. You're just like the rest of them, he tells a woman who bolts after he takes her to a skin flick on a date. Today, Travis Bickle would find consolation on incel forums. He buffs up his body like an acolyte of the manosphere. And in the end, he seeks redemption in violence. His most loving relationship is with his guns. As for too many mass shooters over the past half century, murder seems the only way for Travis to get the world's attention. And the cosmic joke of the film is that it does. Throughout the film, Travis Anguish has appealed to viewers sympathies while he's repelled them with his prejudice and his bloodlust. The climax is a horrific shooting spree at which we, the viewer, finally see Travis for the psychotic he is. But at the same time, within the story, society takes him at his own estimation, and the newspapers decide that his is the right kind of violence and that Travis is a hero. I think in a way, posterity has made a similar mistake with Taxi Driver replacing the alarm it's supposed to cause with admiration. These days, the film's most immortal line, you talking to me, tends to get parroted as a slogan of macho bristle, whereas it's actually spoken by a maniac to his own reflection in a slumland bedsit. Outsiders in New York often feel like they're in a movie, gawking at the city's skyscrapers and the yellow cabs like Travis's and watching the steam rising from manhole covers. So does Travis, actually. He thinks he's in a western or a gangster film, but in a way, I think 50 years on, his genre is horror. He embodies something that still today is very real and very close that you prefer not to see.

[Rosie Bloor]

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. See you back here tomorrow.

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