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As much as I think I generally prefer Schrader as a director to Scorsese, he doesn't have the deftness to sustain doubt as Scorsese did doing the same thing at the end of Taxi Driver
― عباس کیارستمی (Eric H.), Tuesday, 14 February 2023 16:51 (one year ago) link
It honestly would never have occurred to me to doubt the image I am presented with. I don't find anything in the film up to that point which supports the idea of an "unreliable camera" (and that includes the earlier levitation sequence, which I felt was a depiction of a genuine miracle, rather than some sort of "now we are inside his head" thing)
I've also never seen Taxi Driver so I don't have that point of reference.
(But weirdly, in that one old Smog song where he sings "47 pushups / In a winter rates seaside motel / I feel like Travis Bickle / I'm listening to Highway to Hell," I feel like I understand exactly what he means?)
It honestly would never have occurred to me to doubt the image I am presented with. I don't find anything in the film up to that point which supports the idea of an "unreliable camera" (and that includes the earlier levitation sequence, which I felt was a depiction of a genuine miracle, rather than some sort of "now we are inside his head" thing)
by that logic, the camera was reliable during the scene he drank the poison.
― Western® with Bacon Flavor, Tuesday, 14 February 2023 22:14 (one year ago) link
Well, yes, because there is no scene where Toller drinks poison*. We see him fill a glass and lift it, and then we see him stop with the glass nowhere near his face when he notices something off screen. He looks frozen when we cut away from him, and he does not appear to have moved when we cut back to him a second later. And, while the camera is placed far enough to make it difficult to see the contents of the glass after this cutaway, it is not hard at all to see the glittering arc of liquid that flies from the glass when Toller lets it drop to the floor, if one looks for it, as I did a minute ago.
*Of course, alcohol is poison; and the sushi he ate in the fancy restaurant was probably loaded with mercury; so in the long wrong he is just as fucked as the rest of us.