Taxi-driver

Later this week, probably the world’s greatest living film director will celebrate his eightieth birthday. However he celebrates — whether in the company of friends and family in his no doubt opulent Manhattan home, or working on his eagerly awaited new film Killers of the Flower Moon — Martin Scorsese can reach his milestone age in the confidence that his position in cinematic history is assured forever. For a man so steeped in the art and practice of filmmaking — and who has made several excellent documentaries about movies — it must be intensely gratifying for Scorsese to be aware that he is that rarest of persons, a living legend, whose contributions to film will live forever.

‘That was some weird shit,’ George W. Bush is said to have muttered after Donald Trump’s desolate inauguration speech of January 2017. ‘I couldn’t have agreed more,’ wrote Hillary Clinton in What Happened. Americans cannot agree on what has happened to their country, other than that everything has gone wrong. Is it ‘white supremacy’ and patriarchy, or the collapse of the white working class and the decay of patriotism? The symptoms too are polarized, beyond mutual comprehension. The leading cause of young black male deaths is murder, but the leading cause of young white male deaths is suicide. The weirdness of these linked statistics has a common source.