Word: bremers
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Like Booth and unlike most assassins elsewhere in the world, Americans who try to kill the famous are engaged primarily in psychodrama rather than political drama. They do not seem to care much whether their victim belongs to the left or the right. Arthur Bremer, who crippled George Wallace, thought first of killing George McGovern. Lee Harvey Oswald apparently shot at General Edwin Walker, a right-wing fanatic, before killing President Kennedy. Giuseppe Zangara, who took aim at President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 (accidentally killing the mayor of Chicago), said that he would just as soon have killed...
...also the type Arthur Bremer used to gun down George Wallace in 1972-a grotesque coincidence that prompted Chicago Sun-Times Columnist Mike Royko to write, with biting effect: "Now that Charter Arms Corp. has the unique distinction of having two famous people shot by one of their products, I wonder if they have considered using it in their advertising. Something simple and tasteful like: 'The .38 that got George Wallace and John Lennon. See it at your gun dealer...
...Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle is, to all appearances, ordinary--a cabbie who falls in love with a campaign worker--but he is intrinsically interesting because he is psychotic, and of dark aspect, and when the camera rolls the heads start to roll, too. Still, watching newsreels of Arthur Bremer would not be art; on the other side, in the hands of a genius everything is interesting, including ordinary people. You have to let the artist treat what he would--you could say, "Don't make a movie about bores," but you couldn't justify...
...four years later, 1972, when his message was perhaps most powerful, that he was tracked down and shot by the deluded Arthur Bremer while delivering a campaign speech in a Maryland parking lot. One of the bullets lodged near his spine, and he was paralyzed from the waist down. He had won Florida, Tennessee and North Carolina and went on to win in the Maryland and Michigan primaries, but his drive for the nomination was halted. So was his career. He tried yet again in 1976, with male nurses carrying him in his wheelchair, but the old enthusiasm had faded...
...rely solely on intellectual guesswork. Travis's emotional development is sketched vividly, convincingly. When he arrives in New York, his letters and diary are fairly banal, but as his experience begins to baffle him, the tone of his writings become progressively more psychotic, until it reaches an Arthur Bremer-like level of intensity. Scorsese plays on our knowledge of real assassins, but he doesn't abuse it. He provides the context; our sense of history merges seamlessly with our understanding of Travis...