In the decade following the Kennedy assassination, Arthur Bremer, an alienated 21-year-old from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wrote in his diary of his ambition to to do Something Bold And Dramatic, Forceful & Dynamic, A Statement of my manhood for the world to see. Just like Lee Harvey Oswald. Bremer became obsessed with committing a political assassination, and stalked President Richard Nixon at Republican Party conventions. He was frustrated in his aim to get close enough to shoot Nixon, blaming anti-Vietnam war protesters who attracted TV and press cameras, and found he could get closer to Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Wallace was on the campaign trail to secure the Democratic Partys presidential nomination, a pork-barrel Democrat who defied opposition to the Souths old racial segregation laws. He announced his running on the day Bremer was warned by the concerned mother of a girl named Joan that she would inform the police if he continued stalking her. On 17 March 1972, Wallace was gunned down by Bremer at a rally in Maryland. He survived, but was paralysed by spinal injuries up until his death in 1998, spending much of the rest of his life building bridges with the African-American people he had alienated. Bremer was sentenced to 53 years in prison, a sentence he was finally released from in 2007. In 1973, extracts from his personal diary were published under the title An Assassins Diary, despite his failure to actually kill anyone. When screenwriter Paul Schrader wrote his masterwork, Taxi Driver, in 1972, he was living in the same state of near-madness as his title character driving aimlessly around Los Angeles with a handgun in the glove compartment. Adding to his edginess was his other source of inspiration, the news story of Arthur Bremer. In the completed 1975 film,Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro would portray Travis Bickle, a New York cabbie descending into homicidal madness. When he changes his target from a politician to the pimp exploiting a child prostitute, it makes Travis into an accidental hero. Schrader had made his taxi driver a former US Marine, just like Lee Oswald. But the parallels with Bremer are most striking. Bremer pestered a girl for dates only to repulse her with his fixation on pornography, as with Travis and Betsy (played by Cybil Shepherd) in the film. When it was clear he had no chance with the girl, Bremer turned his search for self-esteem into a search for an assassination target Travis turns his attention to the presidential candidate Betsy works for, substituting the plan when he becomes conspicuous in the crowd, as with Bremer and Nixon. Schrader made Traviss ultimate act of violence redemptive, rescuing Iris (Jodie Foster) from her pimp. In the world beyond the movie screen, the irony of a psychotic becoming a hero by default was lost when it connected with another obsessive psyche.Taxi Driver is an iconic film, entwined with the events that both inspired and followed it. It was seen many times by an unbalanced young man named John Hinckley, Jr, who developed a delusional obsession with young actress Jodie Foster and bombarded her with letters. As with his counterpart, Mark Chapman, he also felt a strong sense of identification with the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye. Ironically, it has also been suggested that Chapmans killing of John Lennon, which apparently upset Hinckley greatly, may have been one of the factors that finally led him to act. When his obsession hit crisis point, Hinckley chose the same form of expression as Travis Bickle and Arthur Bremer keeping a diary that told of his attempts to assassinate President Jimmy Carter, and then the new president-elect, Ronald Reagan. Hinckleys eruption into the world was announced in a letter: "Jodie, I would abandon this idea of getting Reagan in a second if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you." Like Bickle and Bremer (and even possibly Oswald), the politics of his target were of no significance, switching from the liberal Carter to right-wing conservative Reagan out of expediency. On 30 March 1981, at the Washington Hilton Hotel, Reagan and his advisers were attending a political meeting. In the conference hall, John Hinckley opened up with a handgun containing customised devastator bullets like the exploding ammunition used by Travis inTaxi Driver. Though he was surrounded by secret service agents, Hinckley was not overpowered until he had fired off all six shots. The sixth hit the President, passing through his lung and necessitating an emergency operation for the seventy-year-old man, while his press secretary, James Brady, suffered brain damage and was forced to live out the rest of his life with impaired motor functions. (Brady also became that rarest of political animals, a Republican advocate of gun control.) Hinckley was found not guilty of attempted murder in 1982 by reason of insanity (a verdict which outraged much of the American public), and committed to a psychiatric hospital. His trial featured a screening ofTaxi Driver, and reluctant testimony from a traumatised Jodie Foster. In recent years, he has won the right to attend private dinners with his wealthy family in stark contrast to Bremers long-term treatment and a pen-pal girlfriend, while he has also composed disturbing, stream-of-consciousness writings for US underground publishers.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
