Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver has long been seen as a controversial masterpiece, a searing time capsule of New York City scraping bottom, and a high point in the fashion history of Mohawk haircuts. Now it turns out that on top of all those things, it's also a stealth fighter in the battle to unleash the forces of free market capitalism. This comes from Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate Robert Mundell, who has revealed to the world a theory that might be called wildly speculative and more than a little tasteless--in a word, Screengrabian. It has to do with the infamous effects of the film on John Hinckley, who developed an obsession with Jodie Foster based on her performance in the movie and watched it over and over, immersing himself in the sight of Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle preparing to assassinate a presidential candidate before switching gears and turning his guns on the Foster character's exploiters. Eventually, in the spring of 1981, Hinckley himself shot Ronald Reagan, then less than two months into his presidency.
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