Solitary Man

Solitary man.

A small bag of groceries.

A meal for one.

Nobody notices him.

Yet, he notices everyone.

“There is no greater solitude than that of a samurai, unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle … perhaps.” —The Book of Bushido

And so begins Jean-Pierre Melville’s neo-noir masterpiece, Le Samouraï. Released in 1967, at first glance, one might mistake it for just another crime film. Throughout, the hero is threatened by either death or prison and forced to evade both the underworld and the law. And yet, there’s something else going on here; something unique lurking behind these tired tropes of hoodlums, cops, trench coats, and revolvers. Sure, as a crime film, it ticks all the boxes. However, at its core, Le Samouraï is more than that. It is a measured meditation on a man’s solitude—a loner in keeping with Camus’s ultimate outsider, Mersault.

A rare cinematic niche, loner cinema is a peculiar beast. By all means, other crime films focus on the solitary hero. However, the samurai of Melville’s movie is the loner par excellence. The protagonist, Jef Costello, is a contract killer. While he lives in Paris—a city teaming with people—his only friend is a caged bird imprisoned in his drab apartment. Apart from a few brief scenes with a prostitute, a nightclub pianist, and some gamblers, he’s disconnected from humanity. In essence, he’s all but a ghost prowling the Paris streets—an observer as cold and clinical as the camera lens that follows him.

Yes, the plot is generic enough. In the opening scenes, Jef guns down a nightclub owner. Later, during a police line-up, a pretty pianist who witnessed the murder fails to identify him. And although he’s released for lack of evidence, the lead detective is certain Jef is guilty. To further complicate matters, Jef’s employers decide to pay him in bullets instead of cash. And with this, the ground is well laid for just another crime flick. There’s the dogged detective, the double-crossing gangsters, and even the two sex kittens who gaze at him as if he were a demigod. And yet, even with all these cliches, Le Samouraï sets a different tone. This simple, stereotypical plot is all but window dressing. Beneath the hyper-stylised surface, Le Samouraï is ultimately a character study of a tragic loner.

Indeed, Jef steals our attention—a loner whose every action only serves to deepen his mystery. Like a fallen angel, he glides amongst the multitude, his wings unruffled by the crowds. The only hint of emotion one sees in him is a brief grimace when he is shot and wounded by a fellow gangster. Otherwise, his mannequin mask remains unmoving throughout. A handsome mask, yes. A mask made for the screen. But it’s all just a veneer—the ideal canvas onto which the viewer might project anything they choose.

Without question, he is a cardboard character—hardly somebody with whom we should want to spend two hours. And yet, 55 years since its release, Le Samouraï remains one of the greatest films ever made. Its influence on other filmmakers cannot be denied. Directors as diverse as Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, David Fincher, Takeshi Kitano and Luc Besson have all made films inspired by it. Honk Kong director John Woo even wrote an essay dedicated to the director, saying, “Melville is god to me.”

Indeed, the moment Delon appears on screen, we are spellbound by the man. Sharply dressed, this poker-faced loner looks like something out of a Gucci fashion catalogue. Sure, the direction is restrained, the cinematography divine, and the jazz score more than adequate. And yet, these alone cannot sustain an entire film. Something else about this loner draws us in as if we might hope to comprehend his ultimate incomprehensibility.

Le Samouraï (1967)

Naturally, in real life, loners are common enough. In literature too, they have found a place to call their own. From Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov through to Kafka’s Joseph K., we’ve had our fair share of literary loners. However, finding a place for them isn’t so simple in the film world.

Most times, these misunderstood men are most at home in hyper-masculine, low-brow genres like westerns, crime films and Japanese samurai movies. One can only guess why they’re often portrayed as violent men with rigid moral codes. Perhaps it’s just economics. After all, in ordinary life, the alienated individual is a pitiful figure and hardly fit for profitable entertainment.

While Jef Costello isn’t the first on-screen loner, he’s undoubtedly one of the best. Cool, calm and collected. And with his pale white skin and dead blue eyes, he reminds one of a modern-day Dracula. Sure, he’s the hero to which the title refers, yet he barely speaks a word. During the opening ten minutes, for example, while he steals a car and drives across Paris to collect a revolver, not a single word is uttered. Not one. Meanwhile, we, the audience, are left hypnotised by this silent, mystery man as he glides through space.

From one scene to the next, from isolation to a crowded nightclub, he never breaks his stride. Not even when he shoots a man in his office does he give anything away. Asked by his victim who he is, he simply replies, “it doesn’t matter”. And then, without explanation, he guns the man down.

Yes, it doesn’t matter. One could say these three words sum up his entire character. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who he is or what his motivation is. He is nobody. His deadpan expression is silence made flesh. The same silence we imagine inside his icy soul. The same silence in which the solitary man must forever reside.

There’s a particular genius in this silence. Without the usual dialogue to explain Jef's behaviour, what remains is an existential void. We’re forced to make meaning where it is otherwise absent. Yes, we know he is a hitman. Yes, he is a loner. But the fundamental question remains. Why? Why does he kill? Why does he have no personality? And more to the point, why does he do anything?

Seeing his miserable life, his mildewed apartment, and his detachment from humanity all feels so pointless. There must be a reason behind his handsome veneer, but it’s difficult to say what it is. Perhaps, killing, for Costello at least, is as mundane as a man rising each day to drink his coffee, put on a suit, and commute into the office for another day behind a desk. We can only guess as the credits roll at the film’s finale.

Sanjuro (1962)

Ah, these solitary men, there must be a reason they return to our screens. Usually, in real life, such men move among us without notice—our work colleagues, family members, or perhaps a passing stranger in the street. I mean those people incapable of mastering the codes of behaviour that help them assimilate, those who can never settle down in one place, or, if they can, those who remain cut off from the world. Like wild beasts, they hide in their dens, isolated from the flock outside, or they wander the land as if in a perpetual state of limbo.

Many films have explored such men—some good, some bad—but almost all of them come to us through the low-brow genres already mentioned. Granted, there have been countless loners on film, but I’m speaking of a particular kind. I mean the loneliest loners—the jungle jaguars and the brooding orangutangs. I mean those with little or no social graces, few or no social connections, and those who are oft-times near invisible. I’m speaking of the true outliers, the heroes of such films as Yojimbo, Ghost Dog, Taxi Driver, or A Fistful of Dollars.

Francois Truffaut argued that once immortalised on film, everything becomes romanticised. And the movies to which I have just referred only reinforce his point. After all, under normal circumstances, these loners are far from acceptable members of society. In real life, we would reject them. And yet, seeing them on screen, we embrace them—assassins, unemployed samurai, corrupt cops, vigilantes, even psychopaths. Often, they subscribe to very particular moral standards (the gangster’s code or the way of Bushido). But ultimately, they reside outside both ethical and legal norms. They can be paid assassins (Le Samourai, Ghost Dog, The American), wandering killers (Yojimbo, Zatoichi, Musashi), or strangers arriving in a new town. (Clint Eastwood made a career in this role, from the first two Dollars films to High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider.) In later decades, they can even be serial killers (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, American Psycho, Maniac.)

And while these loners lack humanity’s most basic skills, they make up for it with an aloof charm, a deep-seated pessimism, and a fantastic skill set—all traits that make for a mysterious charisma. Take Jef Costello’s professionalism as the paid assassin, his stylish suits, and his stunning good looks. Or observe Toshiro Mifune’s swagger and sword skills in Kurosawa’s samurai classic, Yojimbo (1961). Mifune played a similar role in Kurosawa’s Sanjuro (1962). Another man with no name. Another jaded hero set apart from the dullards that surround him.

Indeed, these motifs repeat themselves regardless of the country of origin or the genres themselves. They feed into each other and create their own traditions. Take the two prohibition-era crime novels by Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1929) and The Glass Key (1931). Masterpieces of the crime genre, they would later be adapted to screen by the Coen Brothers with their gangster film, Millers Crossing (1990). However, long before this, a young director in Japan would find inspiration in Hammett’s pages. Indeed, in 1961, Akira Kurosawa transplanted the loner hero of urban America to feudal Japan with the classic samurai film Yojimbo. A film that would reinvigorate the stale samurai films of the 1950s, Yojimbo set a new standard. And a few years later, the Italian director, Sergio Leone, would direct a straight rip-off by turning Kurosawa’s film into a spaghetti western. A Fistful of Dollars (1964), starring Clint Eastwood, would not only make Eastwood’s career but kill off the old Hollywood western and pump new blood into the dying genre. Even in 1996, another adaptation was released—Last Man Standing—which brought the hero back to prohibition America, right where he started.

Yes, the same loner, the same outlier, the same man with no name. Whether portrayed as a gangster in a fedora carrying a pistol, a feudal samurai with a top-knot and a katana, or a cowboy in a Stetson carrying a revolver, it’s all one and the same thing. The same man, merely in different ages and different guises.

The Lineage of a Loner

Of course, there is an argument these films fulfil a certain male fantasy, albeit a nihilistic one. You might even say they cater to disaffected adolescents who might one day shoot up their high schools. To the young male viewer, especially those with chips on their shoulders, such heroes must glow with a dark yet romantic ambience.

In Yojimbo, the loner hero, a nameless samurai, arrives in a lawless town overrun by criminals. Populated almost exclusively by hoodlums and prostitutes, he quickly figures out the lay of the land. Two rival factions are vying for power, with neither side being able to gain the upper hand. And seeing his opportunity to turn a tidy profit and cut down some lowlifes, he decides it’s a town well-suited to his services. Needless to say, by the time the film ends, corpses litter the dusty streets, and our hero returns to his lonesome wanderings.

No doubt, these films share a similar bleak vision. They’re often set in desolate environments where nobility is a rare commodity. And where the usual heroes might want to help their communities, these loners are often knee-deep in their corruption. The world may be rotting all around them, but they’re synonymous with that rot, sometimes even active participants in it. Look at the settings themselves. In Yojimbo, most civilians have fled the corrupt town, and dogs scamper down the street with severed hands in their jaws. In the modern Japan of Takeshi Kitano’s debut film, Sono No Otoko (1989), teenagers beat up elderly vagrants, gangsters rape and inject girls with amphetamines, and cops assault and run down suspects with impunity.

And so it goes. As a vision of life, it’s a cynical one. The world is going to rack and ruin. And yet, our loners somehow maintain their dignity in the face of it. Self-sufficient men, self-controlled and self-contained, violence is their stock in trade. In Yojimbo, when the innkeeper explains the town’s situation in the hope of running the hero out of town, Mifune simply dismisses him by saying, “In this town, I’ll get paid for killing. And this town is full of men who are better off dead.”

Whether we call them heroes or anti-heroes is irrelevant. They’re examples of male violence nearer to moral bankruptcy than heroism. Maybe they’re even an honest vision of the standard hero, one that reveals the hypocrisy hiding below their so-called noble violence. In nearly every example one can think of, they kill without honour. If they can succeed by stabbing a man in the back, you may be assured he is getting a blade between his shoulder blades. And in the end, even when the bad guys lie defeated, these loners shrug it off with near sociopathic indifference. In Yojimbo, for example, one of Mifune’s signature twitches is a meaningful shrug. as if he is shrugging off the death and corruption surrounding him. And then, in the final scene, after he’s cut everybody down, he simply strolls out of town, saying, “see you later,” as if he were out for a Sunday stroll.

Unlike their noble forebears, these heroes act for personal reasons rather than society's sake. In the Dollars films, the hero seems solely motivated by money. So too, in Yojimbo, on which the Dollars films are based. Mercenary men inhabit these worlds, men whose motives, even when they appear heroic, remain ambiguous. In Sanjuro, after slaughtering the bad guys, the hero leaves town without a backward glance. In Sono No Otoko, Detective Azuma, played by Beat Takeshi, beats and kills his suspects without mercy or compassion.

If the usual heroes are liberal democracy’s flag bearers, perhaps these loners are their nearest nihilistic equivalents. Forget Dirty Harry’s struggles with bureaucratic red tape. His rebellion is tepid by comparison. In Sono No Otoko, Detective Azuma beats up a teen suspect while the boy’s parents are in the next room. He couldn’t care less about his victims or his honour. When he realises his mentally retarded sister has been raped and turned into a junkie by gangsters, there’s no thought of therapy or drug treatment. Not at all. His solution is a simple one. A single shot from his pistol is his remedy—a so-called mercy killing far more cruel than it is compassionate.

Sono No Otoko (1989)

As for the women in these films, there’s little to say that’s positive. Naturally, in such macho genres, women are often brutalised. In Italian and Japanese genre films, gratuitous sexual violence is par for the course. In Hollywood, however, they’re usually portrayed as either femme fatales or damsels in distress—that tired old binary that sees women as either Madonna or whore. In High Plains Drifter (1973), the hero, played by Clint Eastwood, even rapes a woman in a barn. Worse still, when she complains to the townsfolk about the offence, she’s told, “You can’t just tell a man who is used to having what he wants that he can’t have it.” And sadly, it’s safe to assume that many male viewers envy Clint Eastwood his free pass for rape and murder.

Nonetheless, loner cinema often puts these cliches to the sword. In many cases, the female characters are either relegated to the margins or are entirely absent. Unlike most noir films, our men are often unaffected by a woman’s charms. No femme fatale can seduce these loners. No poor maiden can tug at their heartstrings. Even a whore fails to inspire them to arousal despite offering themselves up on a platter. And while at first glance, this may not seem like much of a male fantasy, isn’t it just a higher form of it? Doesn’t it show the unlikely possibility that despite the power of a woman’s sexuality, a man might have the power to resist it?

Of course, much has been said regarding the phallic symbolism of all these men wielding swords and long-barrelled revolvers. Some critics, however, go so far as to argue that these films cater to homosexual fantasy. And with their all-male casts, cowboys in tight jeans, and samurais thrusting swords inside other men, there is ample evidence for the argument. Physical combat between males could be seen as a symbol of homosexual sex. Moreover, men who have no problem resisting even the most desirable female are prone to raise some eyebrows in the more psychoanalytical viewer.

Ultimately, far more qualified commentators have written about homoeroticism in these genres. Recent films like Brokeback Mountain (2005) and The Power of the Dog (2021) have already addressed homosexuality in westerns. And Nagisa Oshima’s 1999 film, Taboo, focused on gay love in the Shinsengumi, an elite samurai unit during the dying days of the Tokugawa era.

Taboo (1999)

A common theme in loner cinema is the hero’s violent death. However, unlike most tragic heroes, the hero’s death is often suicidal rather than an act of self-sacrifice. If anything, these heroes seem to seek death rather than avoid it. Like the mass shooters in the U.S. nowadays, it’s as if they want to take as many people with them as possible before their final act of self-annihilation.

In Le Samouraï, the hero’s final act is your typical example of suicide by cop. Knowing the police are watching him, he revisits the nightclub to confront the pretty pianist who helped save him from arrest. Although he is being observed, he still aims his revolver at her. And it’s only after the police have gunned him down that we discover his revolver wasn’t loaded after all.

In Jim Jarmusch’s 1999 film, Ghost Dog (another film inspired by the samurai), the loner hero, Forrest Whittaker, a hitman in the mob’s employ, sacrifices himself for no precise purpose. Even though he is armed, he lets himself be gunned down.

Of course, in both examples, one can see parallels between suicide and the samurai. And yet, is it as simple as mere cultural appropriation? Isn’t there a suicidal impulse in loners the world over, whether a wandering ronin or a jaded cab driver?

Indeed, even in Martin Scorcese’s 1979 film, Taxi Driver, the loner hero is suicidal. In his deluded mind, Travis Bickle sees himself as a hero saving a young prostitute from sexual servitude. But then, suicide plays a crucial part in his plans. After gunning down several men involved in the prostitute’s debasement, he tries to shoot himself. However, when he raises two different guns to his head, he discovers that he has run out of ammunition.

And so the list grows. In Jarmusch’s 1995 western, Dead Man, the loner hero, played by Johnny Depp, is on a long journey towards the end of the earth where he can finally cross over to the other side. Not only does the film’s title reference his death. Even his name, William Blake (a name he shares with a dead English poet), inspires his native American travelling companion to point out that he really is a dead man.

In Martin Ritt’s loner western, Hombre (1961), the hero, a white man raised by the Apache, is killed while saving the people who wouldn’t even share a stagecoach with him when they learn of his Apache pedigree. And for a final example of the suicidal impulse, in Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional (1994), the hitman hero commits suicide by pulling a pin on a grenade strapped to his chest.

It begs the question: is the loner’s life so insufferable that violent bloodbaths and suicide are the only solutions? Is it that they resent the society with which they cannot assimilate? Or do they resent themselves for failing to find a comfortable place within it?

Leon: The Professional (1994)

Their superficial coolness aside, our loner heroes are emotionally stunted and often incapable of negotiating normal human relationships. While they may display courage and skill, social interaction is their ultimate weakness. In Sanjuro, Mifune may be blunt with the band of young samurai he leads, but his awkwardness with women betrays him. In the Zatoichi series (1962-1989), the blind swordsman also struggles to relate to women. Throughout the series, numerous ladies make romantic demands on him, throwing him off his game. This killer of hundreds, courageous enough to battle bands of men at a time, is left blushing in the face of mere femininity.

Of course, these men must be outcasts for a reason. Socially awkward, they remind us of shy teenagers or jaded cynics. In most cases, you can safely assume their outlier status is an intrinsic part of their character. And yet, despite their social curse, this doesn’t mean they have no desire for human intimacy. It’s just that, given their social retardation, unorthodox relationships are their only viable alternative.

In Le Samouraï, Jef Costello’s pet Bulfinch symbolises his need for connection. Granted, he might be a hardened killer, but does that mean his heart is made entirely of stone? Even a connection with something as tenuous as a bird is better than no connection. A similar thing can be found in Ghost Dog, another story about a contract killer. He lives in a rundown shack atop an apartment building, where he tends to a flock of carrier pigeons. And later, when the villains kill his birds, it’s obvious they’ve hit him where it hurts. Other scenes reveal his love for the animal kingdom—several meetings with a dog, a bird landing on his rifle, and even the killing of two hunters for having shot a bear. His only human relationships only highlight his desire for connection and his inability to achieve it in a normal manner. We see him form a tenuous friendship with a little girl, the two of them bonding over books in the local park. His other friend, if you could call him that, is the local ice cream man—a French-speaking fellow who cannot understand English.

This pattern repeats itself in numerous films. In Leon: The Professional, Leon’s only friend is an indoor plant. He waters it religiously, spraying and wiping down each leaf with the utmost care. When he is forced to change apartments, he takes the plant with him as if he couldn’t bear to part from it. And in the film’s final shootout, he even goes so far as to wrap the plant in a blanket, so it doesn’t get damaged. While the film focuses on his awkward relationship with the teen girl, Matilda, their friendship is far from ordinary. Matilda only punctuates Leon’s social deformity. Sure, he may be a grown man, and she a mere girl, but with time, one soon recognises that she possesses far more emotional maturity than he does.

And so, more patterns emerge. The nameless samurai of Yojimbo develops a brief friendship with the innkeeper and coffin maker. Travis Bickle, of Taxi Driver fame, tries to build something meaningful with a teenage prostitute. Musashi, in both Hiroshi Inagaki’s The Samurai Trilogy (1954-1956) and Tomu Uchida’s five-film series, Miyamoto Musashi (1961-1965), takes on two boys as disciples and does everything he can to avoid the two women pursuing him.

Indeed, it seems the loner, despite his attempts at human connection, is doomed to wander the earth alone.

Ghost Dog (1999)

Thankfully, with the rise of independent cinema in the 1970s, loner cinema branched out from these pseudo-heroic beginnings, and we started seeing a more honest exploration of the type. While gunslingers, assassins and swordsmen have their place in the popular imagination, they aren’t exactly an accurate representation of loners in real life.

And so enters Martin Scorsese. His seminal film Taxi Driver (1976) was an instant classic—a film so shocking the censors forced him to desaturate its bloodiest scenes. But it wasn’t just its graphic nature that shocked the public’s delicate tastes. Its style and subject matter were revolutionary too. More importantly, its twisted hero, Travis Bickle—played to perfection by Robert DeNiro—was a loner for a new age. Written by Paul Schrader, the script alone is a work of genius. But coupled with Scorsese and DeNiro at the peak of their powers, Taxi Driver was destined for cult status.

Unlike other films before it, Scorsese didn’t drape his loner hero in the gowns of a gangster, cowboy or samurai, nor try to make him cool or charismatic. Quite the contrary. He gave us the loner in all his repulsive, irrational glory. He didn’t shy away from uncomfortable truths, no matter how unsettling. Travis may be on a mission to save a prostitute from a predatory pimp, but the audience does not doubt that his aims are far more ignoble than noble.

Instead of holding the solitary man up as the hero, Scorsese does the opposite. Where the usual loners are gifted in some regards, Travis is cursed across the board. And yet, despite his most unsettling traits, we cannot look away. At times, we even come to empathise with him.

Nevertheless, as we search him for redeeming qualities, we come away empty-handed. There’s only bitterness bubbling inside his veins. Beaten down by life, Travis struggles to keep his insanity in check. The entire film, we watch him unravelling, edging ever closer towards his inevitable psychological collapse. If anything, he is a cautionary character, not the romanticised loner one is accustomed to seeing on screen. A character driven mad by his solitude. A man who does everything he can to find his place in respectable society but who is doomed to remain on its fringes, undigestible and unassimilable.

Granted, Travis has his ideals but is doomed from the beginning to failure. Cursed by his inability to reach such heights, he sabotages himself, whether wittingly or unwittingly. He may be oblivious to his despicable destiny, but the audience knows otherwise. It’s a modern-day Greek tragedy, and Oedipus cannot alter his fate. It’s like watching the Zapruder tape. We all know what is coming. While President Kennedy sits calmly in his limousine, oblivious to the rifle aimed at him from above, we simply wait to hear the gunshot and see his head explode.

And so, as the tension mounts, we await Travis’s tragic fate. He is no hero. Nor is he a romantic anti-hero. He is a walking contradiction, a schizophrenic, a man torn between his bipolarities. On the one hand, he works out and talks of physical discipline. On the other hand, he pours whiskey on his cereal, and pops prescription pills. When he turns to his colleagues for advice, he cannot grasp their solutions. And although he seeks human connection, he either sabotages himself intentionally or is so socially inept that there was never even a chance of success.

When he manages to convince a pretty professional into going out with him, he guarantees his failure by taking her to a skin flick in one of the seediest parts of town. And after this fiasco, the best he can do to salvage his addled ego is to set his sights on the teenage hooker, Iris, played by a 12-year-old Jodie Foster. Deluded by his megalomaniacal self-image and failing to assassinate a senator, Travis now seeks his quasi-religious redemption in a twisted mission of slaughter and suicide.

Granted, it’s an unsettling film. There’s no avant-garde Ennio Morricone score to lift our spirits here. Instead, we’re subjected to the doom-laden music of Bernard Herrmann as we accompany Travis across town. On all sides, he is surrounded by New York City’s lost souls—the prostitutes, perverts, pushers and pimps. There are few signs of wealth or refinement. There’s nothing but corruption and decline. The Big Apple is no longer a symbol of America’s success but rather a sign of its decay. Sitting in a coffee shop, Travis scowls at the black pimps at the other tables, seething inside with racist resentment. And later, when he picks up a presidential candidate as a passenger, he tells him, “I think that the President should clean up this whole mess here. He should flush it down the fuckin’ toilet.”

No, there’s little hope of redemption here. Travis symbolises the eternal loner, incapable of finding a place at society’s table. Not only does his behaviour reveal his outsider status, but his own words do too. From the opening scenes, his first-person narration deepens our awareness of his looming psychological break. At one point, he tells us, “Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit.” Another time, he explicitly addresses his loner status, saying, “Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man.”

Yes, God’s lonely man—a man, like Jef Costello, living an isolated existence in one of the most crowded cities on the planet. And just like Le Samouraï, there’s no denying Taxi Driver’s cultural impact. One of the most bizarre examples is John Hinckley Jr, a loner from Texas. Hinckley’s real-life madness would feed off Travis’s fictional equivalent. Obsessed with the movie and infatuated with the actress, Jodie Foster, Hinckley wrote her love letters and poems. And when his missives remained unanswered, he took a page out of Bickle’s book.

In 1981, Hinckley tried to assassinate President Reagan. And while his attempt was a failure, he managed to wound the President, a press secretary, a secret service agent, and even a police officer. He also succeeded in cementing his name in popular culture. This real-world loner, inspired by a fictional loner, went on to inspire rock bands, musicals, novels, and even several television movies. Stranger still, when he was released after 34 years in a mental health facility, he even tried to make a career for himself as a musician.

Yes, art may imitate life, but life may imitate art sometimes too.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Fifty years since its release, Taxi Driver persists as one of the most honest expressions of the loner in screen history. Having dispensed with the usual stereotypes, Scorsese invented a new genre. The film website, IMDB, might call it a crime drama, but in truth, it’s a genre without name or precedent. At times, it verges more on voyeurism than entertainment. A fly-on-the-wall observational study of madness and isolation, it wasn’t made for the squeamish. Confronting the audience with an uncomfortable reality, Scorsese treats his cursed hero with a tenderness rarely seen in cinema and especially not towards a character so reprehensible. The director, Quentin Tarantino, would even say that Taxi Driver is the best first-person character study ever committed to film.

And thankfully, once Scorsese, Schrader and DeNiro opened the door to this new breed of loner, other writers and directors would soon flock to follow them through it. And while it didn’t kill off the mythic loner of yesteryear, Taxi Driver sure enriched the medium, granting both independent and genre directors a richer palette with which to work.

On the independent front, for example, filmmakers now dared to tackle such unsavoury characters without resorting to the larger-than-life heroes of earlier genre films. Not only did it muddy the waters of black-and-white morality, but it also turned the scales of justice on their head. You could even say it gave birth to Psycho Cinema—those films that swap superficial villainy for a deeper human understanding of such morally complex characters.

Movies like Falling Down (1993) or Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone (1998) clearly take their inspiration from Scorsese’s original. Both are tales about ordinary men losing their minds in the face of a rotten society. Both force the audience to socialise with misfits and malcontents. And while the former film is a more palatable version of a loner’s psychotic collapse, the latter pushes the envelope further than any other film before it. The hero, an out-of-work butcher, played by Philippe Nahon, is one of the most despicable characters ever seen on screen. A blatant racist and homophobe, he even admits his sexual feelings towards his daughter.

Picking up where Taxi Driver left off, Noé dials up the horror to suit the modern age. In one scene, the butcher punches his heavily pregnant girlfriend several times in the belly. In another scene, there is a ten-second warning to the audience to leave the cinema before we witness him sexually assault his daughter and then shoot her in the throat. Laid out on the floor, gasping for life like a goldfish, we watch the blood spurting out of her. The director even holds the shot for several seconds until the butcher finally fires the coup de grace into her brain.

Again, while it doesn’t make for pleasant viewing, I Stand Alone approaches the psychotic loner with rare, unflinching honesty. It doesn’t shy away from the subject matter or try to soften it to suit the audience’s softer sensibilities. Other films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), Bad Lieutenant (1992) and American Psycho (2000) also approach these broken loners with a brutal directness unseen before Taxi Driver hit our screens.

I Stand Alone (1998)

And so, almost a century since that first loner shone out of a projector, loner cinema persists. From charismatic cowboys to downright psychopaths, these men will return to us. As an archetype, it refuses to perish. We can no longer shy away from the subject matter, even in its darkest guises. It might have taken half a century to reach full bloom, but the bleakest figures of literature finally found their way onto our screens. Dostoyevsky may have written about them over 100 years ago, but it would take decades for both film audiences and censors to stomach them at full strength.

Even authors like Jim Thompson would have to watch the best screen adaptations of their work from the grave. The Killer Inside Me, published in 1952, while adapted for the screen in 1976, wouldn’t have an honest film version until 2010. And the truth is, audiences just weren’t ready for it. After all, it isn’t often we want to see one of our biggest stars (Casey Affleck) kicking a starlet (Kate Hudson) to death, a murder so brutal that she visually voids her bowels.

The lord only knows why we are drawn to such men. All that is certain is that they won’t be going anywhere soon. It may have taken some time to accustom audience’s palates to their most realistic expression, but the hunger for these characters has always been present. Whether we’re talking about the more innocent representations of loners as cowboys or the more honest view of them as sociopaths, the type is eternal. As they have existed in humanity for all time, they will live on our screens for all time too.

Sure, they still make loner heroes in the usual mould to cater to the broadest audience, but even the most mainstream films have now absorbed independent cinema to the point that the two have become blurred. The line separating the two is now so vague that directors like Todd Phillips can make a big-budget mainstream film like Joker (2019) and yet give its broken hero a nuance and complexity once thought impossible.

For decades, The Joker had been little more than a comic book supervillain. However, this recent incarnation is something else entirely. A character study disguised as a comic book adaptation, Todd Phillips gives us a loner near unthinkable only a few decades earlier. The clown villain portrayed over the years by Cesar Romano, Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger and Jared Leto only reached full maturity in 2019, half a century after his first appearance. Joaquin Phoenix’s sublime portrayal of the man even earned him a well-deserved Best Actor Oscar.

No doubt, the loner has come a long way. Tracing its lineage more to Taxi Driver than the Batman comics, Joker reveals how far we’ve come since Clint Eastwood donned his Stetson and Toshiro Mifune his swords. The villain of yesteryear has vanished and so too the loner hero. Instead, we have God’s lonely man in all his inglorious glory. Dressed up as just another blockbuster, Todd Phillips bursts the bubble-gum comic book genre in a single film. Just like Taxi Driver, it is a tragedy. And yet, rather than making us loathe this so-called villain, we walk away having empathised with him for two hours straight. How Marvel and DC can keep churning out more generic comic book films in its aftermath defies comprehension.

Joker (2019)

In Le Samouraï, as the nightclub pianist, Valérie, drives the loner, Jef Costello, across town, she asks him, “What kind of man are you?” And naturally, he cannot give her an adequate answer beyond his trademark silence.

But then, is Valérie surprised by this silence? Does she believe he can provide an acceptable answer? After all, what reasons can a loner give to justify himself in the face of society’s eternal misunderstandings? How can he explain his curse when he doesn’t even understand it himself?

Ultimately, it’s a question that no words can adequately address. The only reply a loner can give to it is his impenetrable behaviour which will only serve to deepen his mystery and further isolate him from the world.

In Taxi Driver, when Travis tells the pimp, “I’m hip,” the man laughs at him and says, “Funny, you don’t look hip.” And later, over breakfast, as Travis tries to convince Iris to stop turning tricks, she calls him a square and tells him he looks like a narc. Worse still, just like her pimp, she laughs in his face, saying, “I don’t know who’s weirder, you or me.”

And that’s just it. Beneath the surface, all loners are weird. And maybe that’s a fundamental facet of their timeless allure. They might appear human, but they’re lacking something—something crucial. They intrigue us, they impress us, they frighten us, they baffle us, and at times, they even amuse us. And still, that unanswered question lingers in the air like cigarette smoke. What kind of men are we dealing with here?

Loners, yes. That’s a given. But what does that mean exactly?

Indeed, no matter how many movies we make about them, the loner will remain a mystery—the man with no name, the ghost in the shadows, the misfit, the outcast, the man cursed for eternity.

Perhaps the question itself is pointless. Or maybe it’s the answer.

Maybe Jef Costello was right, when asked who he was, to say, “It doesn’t matter.”

No, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is every few years, another mesmerising loner will undoubtedly shimmer across our screens if only to remind us of these ghostly men lurking in the shadows.

The Killer Inside Me (2010)

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.” —Thomas Wolfe (God’s Lonely Man)