Gaspar Noé names the “cinematic hero” he wants to be
In the online film community, there’s a running joke that nobody is as messed up as Gaspar Noé. Having garnered a special kind of notoriety due to the unparalleled brutality of his films, Noé has carved out a unique space for himself. While some of his works – such as Irréversible – have generated a lot of controversies and critical backlash, it cannot be denied that the Argentine auteur is one of the most original artists in the current landscape.
Often associated with the French Extremity movement, Noé has constantly experimented with the boundaries of the cinematic medium to create new kinds of artistic expressions. This is evident in masterpieces such as Enter the Void, a dizzying achievement which completely redefines our traditional definitions of cinema and asks unanswerable questions about the fundamental contradictions of the human condition.
Noé’s transgressive cinematic sensibilities have definitely been influenced by the kind of cinema he experienced during his formative years. In fact, his mother actually took him to witness Pasolini’s infamously cruel opus Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, in order to understand the structures of power that govern our relationships as well as society. In the latest edition of the BFI Sight and Sound poll, Noé also acknowledged the influence of another masterpiece – Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
While writing about the film, Noé claimed: “If there’s a cinematic hero I dream of being, it’s Travis Bickle. This film fills me with joy at De Niro’s charisma and Scorsese’s amphetaminic staging. He’s the kindest and most cinephilic film director I’ve ever had the luck of meeting. With Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver, this is the film that seems to best represent the dirty New York of the ’60s and ’70s as the centre of the world in which I partly grew up.”
Of course, classifying Travis Bickle as a “hero” is a bit strange since he is one only in his own self-deluded mind. However, many disillusioned young cinephiles have often found comfort in Bickle’s lonely ramblings about societal decay since Taxi Driver manifests the hostility that many people feel harbour towards the depressing trajectory of modern sociopolitical conditions. For Noé, De Niro’s character represents something greater.
In an interview with The New York Times, the director gushed: “De Niro is the most sympathetic man I’ve seen on screen, to this day. In my last film, the main character uses the same Vietnam vet’s green jacket, which I also wear to feel more self-confident when I go out at night. One of my life’s regrets is that I ended up losing my hair without ever having Travis’s mohawk cut. If Kubrick made me love forever the film language, Scorsese made me love actors.”
Only someone like Noé can idolise someone like Bickle, who is neither a hero nor a villain. He is just a manifestation of a crumbling society, consumed by his own insanity.
