The Five Movie Characters Men Wish They Were, Part 4-Travis Bickle

After writing about men wishing they were an ass-crushing turbine of sexual attraction, a successful (if unlawful) businessman and the coolest guy to ever walk the Earth, I realized that there is a dark side to the average male I had overlooked. A sinister aspect that bore mention. You see, sometimes, men don’t want to be part of the world. They want to say “fuck it” to everything, including sanity and reason. Look no further than Nazi Germany, Columbine or the fan base of the Cleveland Browns for examples.

In the realm of movie nutjobs that every dude wishes he were, there’s only one option to go with: Travis “You Talkin’ to Me?” Bickle. Who are your other possibilities? Jame Gumb aka Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs? While I enjoy the “Great big fat person” line more than anyone, for the purposes of my list, I’m limiting myself to characters created for a movie, not adapted from a book. Not to mention that, despite what your mothers told you in an effort to scare you away from having premarital sex, ladies, most men don’t have a sublimated desire to butcher and fabricate a skin suit out of their dates. To top it off, remember that scene where Bill dances around to “Goodbye Horses”? Not to brag, but I’m far too well-endowed to pull off that maneuver. If I tucked my penis, I’d be a few stripes and a pair of fox ears away from looking like Mario in his Tanooki Suit.

God help me, but I was almost tempted to go with a woman here. Almost. Does the name Alex Forrest ring a bell? She’s the character Glenn Close played in Fatal Attraction. Sure, she peed sitting down and had that ridiculous Louis the XIV hair, but…as far as delivering batshit crazy vengeance, she’s up there. A dude screwed her over and she murdered his kid’s pet, then attempted to kill both him and his spouse. I’ve never even had the guts to drop a deuce on an ex’s doorstep much less boil their bunny.

Luckily, I came to my senses in time and realized, “Hey, you know who’s more intimidating than a knife-wielding woman coming right at me? Any man doing anything.” Charles Xavier lowering himself to the toilet seat using those cripple bars in the middle of the night to explosively shit out some of Jubilee‘s putrid Asian fusion cooking, would scare me more. That’s just science.

The belt goes to Travis Bickle because he was a man’s psycho. We identify with him. The guy wasn’t “Use my feces to replicate Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting on the roof of my den” crazy, just frustrated and violent. He watched too much porn. He ate crappy food. He took women on disastrous dates. He was the kind of lunatic that the guys want to shoot with and the ladies want to get shot by. If I lived in a world without the Internet and cable television to keep my dopamine levels a sliver above zero, I can guarantee you I’d have lashed out at society in ways that make Travis Bickle look like Mohandas Gandhi by comparison.

Plus…Travis had game. He had the balls to approach Cybill Shepherd in her prime and successfully pick her up. Those who read my work regularly know I hate blondes because they age in dog years and their heads are filled with uppity beliefs like “I’m Daddy’s princess and demand to be treated as such” and “No, I won’t let you choke me in bed as you cry hysterically and scream the word ‘whore’ in my face.” But Cybill Shepherd in her heyday was something else.

Look at that. Travis had the guts to ask that out, whereas I’d stutter saying “hi” to a coworker with a .2 BAC sitting atop a Xerox machine photocopying her cooze at the office Christmas party. The guy simply didn’t take shit. He drove his cab into the worst of neighborhoods, shot thugs that got in his face and even rescued a teenage prostitute from a life of addiction and sexual slavery. Yes, he also plotted the assassination of a presidential candidate to get back at a woman who broke his heart after a single date, but haven’t we all done some embarrassing things in the name of love? If I were a walking down a dark alley and a few hoods were coming toward me, there’s no one I’d rather be than Travis Bickle.

Tagged as: five movie characters men wish they were,  Robert De Niro,  Taxi Driver,  Travis Bickle.