In Taxi Driver, he sees the girl at the political. ![]() In First Reformed, a young kid kills himself. “In Light Sleeper, he sees a girl in the rain. “These guys I write, the taxi driver and gigolo and the drug dealer-that sense of being inside somebody who is waiting, wearing his mask for so long waiting for something to happen and then something happens,” the filmmaker says. In a special feature on Indicator’s Light Sleeper Blu-ray, Schrader connects the three films. They hear the thoughts of their clients, people more than happy to unload their basest ideas onto this total stranger, because to the clients, these men are merely figments. They’re ghosts, observing the fall of everything around them. Like the protagonists in Schrader’s previous two entries in what’s been dubbed his “trilogy of loners”-Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Julian Kay in American Gigolo-these men offer something to a world that doesn’t give them much in return. If he disappeared, they’d simply find someone else to replace him. His existence is a transient one, floating into people’s lives to exchange goods for cash, and floating out just as easily. The message is pretty clear: The world is coming down around him, and LeTour is merely existing to bear witness.Ī former addict now clean, LeTour makes his trade in selling to those not as lucky as him to kick the habit. ![]() ![]() In the opening moments, we watch LeTour ride around in the back of a car, gazing out at the city’s denizens through the window while Michael Been’s doom-laden “World on Fire” blares over the soundtrack. That search for something to hang onto is present almost immediately in Light Sleeper, which follows the exploits of John LeTour (Willem Dafoe), a mid-level New York drug dealer nearing 40. Finding hope in the films of Paul Schrader can often feel like a lost cause, but it’s usually there…you’ve just got to look a little harder.
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