SMOKERS’ CORNER: The Lure of Fascist Fantasies

In the 1976 Hollywood classic Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro stars as a disturbed military veteran who works gruelling shifts as a cab driver through the decaying, sleazy backdrop of New York City. Plagued by chronic insomnia and living alone in a cramped apartment, he spends his nights ferrying passengers who seem to mirror the city’s moral collapse. He is a man of few words, and the film gradually…