Travis Bickle. Rupert Pupkin. David DePape. We Need A Movie.

deadline.com:

Travis Bickle. Rupert Pupkin. Gil Renard. David DePape? Where’s Robert De Niro when you need him? De Niro, who has a way of elevating weird character roles into commanding lead parts, made a cottage industry of portraying the sort of person who now stands accused of attacking Paul Pelosi, in what is alleged to have been a scheme to take hostage his wife Nancy, the Speaker of the U.

S. House of Representatives. (DePape has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and other charges.) Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1982) Renard in The Fan (1996) were eerily recognizable as examples of a perhaps uniquely American type.

Marginalized. Damaged. Increasingly isolated. They spiral into very personal obsession, as the noisy pop and political culture overwhelms their fragile grip on the real.

It was fascinating stuff, the more so because brilliant filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, who directed both Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, or Tony Scott, who made The Fan, probed their scary subjects with a kind of chilling empathy that is necessarily lost in the politically riven media coverage of a DePape.