Escaping the glance of Lady Justice?

Taxi Driver (Miniseries, S1E1-16; Korean; 2021)

With the wisdom proffered by age and experiences learned from the School of Hard Knocks, I am convinced that life is convoluted. Nothing one does is 100% right or good; conversely, not doing is not always wrong. If one can justify his actions and give convincing rhetoric, he can be considered a do-gooder. 

The miniseries is about this in sixteen episodes and more than 16 hours altogether. In the crooks-filled metropolitan city of Seoul, there is no shortage of murderers and serial killers. After the tedious process of investigating, collecting evidence and prosecuting, the victims and their relatives find that the courts are pretty docile. More often than not, the accused go scot-free. Sometimes, they get away with a slap on the wrist or technical issues. The feeling is that the perpetrators never feel the pain that the victims and their families endured. To add injury to insult, the wrongdoers mock the system, police and the accusers and carry on the things they do best with impunity. 

With increasingly intelligent lawyers with crooked minds to catch the obscure loophole in the law, more wrongdoers escape the glance of Lady Justice (because she is blindfolded?). Because law practitioners find better remuneration defending the accused than prosecuting them, the best ones bend over backwards to get them off the hook. Forensic sciences have improved by leaps and bounds, and so have the ways to create the element of doubt. The fear of punishing a single innocent person over letting a guilty person for free is always there. The need to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt is always the mantra.

Victims of serial killers get together to apprehend to mete their own brand of punishment under the guise of running a taxi company. To help out in their endeavour, they get the help of a local mafia lady boss. Hot on their trail is a young prosecutor who senses something fishy going on under the hood of the taxi company.

The season tackles many societal issues that often go unnoticed. A mentally challenged lady is abused at a factory that was supposedly set up for the specially-abled. The culture of workplace bullying to achieve better sales hits the roof when someone is beaten up. A high school boy is bullied because he is poor. The protagonist of the show, an ex-army, had his mother killed by a mad killer and has set his life mission to save victims of the evil elements of society. He passes his name card to the person he thinks needs his help. In this vigilante group are the CEO of an NGO, a hacker and two mechanics.

In the later episodes, the vigilante group realise that they have been cheated by the Mafia, who opt to monetise the prisoners by harvesting their organs! A three-cornered pursuit starts, with the police and public prosecutor's office on one side, the other being the Mafia and the vigilante group.

Playing by the book may not be the best; neither is taking the law into your own hands. What if the situation and circumstances squarely put the wrong person as guilty? It happened in this miniseries. A man was wrongly jailed for 20 years only to be released later after the real killer confessed. Who will return the 20 years of loss of respect, job, love, family life, seeing the world change, and living the one life he had been sent to Earth for?

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Grab a cab?

My experience in Spain is that the taximen there are not really affected by the hailing of rides stimulated by the digital economy. Nobody calls in or rather uses the Uber App to pimp their rides. The taxis still function as before, and they never lost their sleep over it. Just why is this possible?

Sure, the taximen invested a lot of money in their machines and their licences. For the Uber drivers, it is just another way to make extra revenue. Being the socialist, people-minded that the elected government is, it naturally cared more for the people that elected them rather than the business people who financed their campaign. Furthermore, at a time when everyone has become nationalistic if not, practising 'identity politics', it does not help that the parent company is foreign-owned.

Whatever way the debates go, the bottom line is providing a service. Mobility and agility is an essential tool for an economy to prosper. The service providers cannot hold the end-users to ransom. Above all, they should provide a reasonable and workable facility.

This could be a wake-up call to our local cabbies, who, when given the carte blanche of solely providing the private chauffering amenity, were too haughty, lazy and lackadaisical at best. Above all, the taxi drivers are providing a vital service to spur the economy and even to promote the country to that occasional tourist like my experience in Spain. Still, no one is indispensable.

Backfired! Public perception of taxi drivers at the lowest ebb 

after being rude to the 93-year old re-elected PM, during a 

public discourse.

You talking to me?*

Taxi Driver (1976)
After watching Satyajit Ray's 1962 Abhijan about a cynical taxi driver, the only natural thing to is watch another cynical taxi driver. This time in the form of Martin Scorsese's depiction of a mentally disturbed Yellow Cab driver in New York.
If Ray's protagonist was trying to find the answer to life and morality, Scorsese's character, Travis Bickle (a young Robert De Niro) takes his own moral judgement on the wrongdoers.
A honourably discharged ex-Marine Travis, takes the job of night cab driver to make some money and as he is as awake as an owl at a time when most sane people are sleeping. He cannot stand the filth and vice that goes on in the streets and wishes that something could be done to clean it up.
We can see that he is having some kind of post traumatic stress disorder as he narrates his life in his journal.
He is infatuated with a Presidential candidate campaigner, Betsy (a young Cybill Shepherd). He finally plucks some courage to ask her out on a date after some hesitation. The later outings became uncomfortable and Betsy just stays away.
In the meantime, Travis bumps into a teenage prostitute, Iris (a young Jodie Foster), who is roughed out by her pimp but he just moves on with his work. Every now and then Travis bumps into Iris as she carries on with her work.

*This is a classic scene of a monologue

by Travis talking to himself at the mirror

whilst posing menacingly with his gun.

The rejection by Betsy proved to be a turning point in his life. He starts exercising, buys himself some guns and starts practising in the shooting range. On day, whilst shopping at his usual grocer, he witnesses a robbery. With his new found skill, he guns down the robber. The owner of the grocery is grateful and plants the gun on the thief!
Travis finally meets up with Iris and discovers her side of the story. She seems quite happy and grateful to her pimp for what he is doing. Somehow, now Travis feels that he needs to help her. He arranges for his savings to be sent to Iris, arms himself with guns (to the teeth!) and leaves his room to attempt to assassinate the Presidential candidate! - Don't ask me why? Probably, he felt that the candidate was not promising much to clean the filth off the city!.
After his attempt was foiled by the Secret Service, he goes on a shooting rampage at Iris' pimp and her bodyguard. Travis is seriously injured in the process but as the events turned out, as churned by the media, Travis is hailed as hero for saving a teenage prostitute.
After a protracted hospital stay, Travis is discharged from hospital to read a letter of appreciation from Iris' parents. Iris had continued her studies.
Travis goes back to his usual night cab job. Guess who takes his ride? Betsy. After some pleasantries on the turn of events in his life, they smile. He leaves her at her destination, sees at rear mirror, Betsy going up her apartment and the film abruptly ends!
In both films about taxi drivers (Satyajit's 1962 Abhijan and this one), you ask yourself what they are going to do next as the storyline is not so predictable. But then, with Hollywood, with the advantage of technical resources and the fetish for gore, Taxi Driver leaves a disturbing after taste with the gun, violence and blood splatter.
Whoever who said, "Guns don't people, people do!" must be wrong. With some many seemingly normal people scaling our streets and our lives daily, the damage done at the height of unabated emotion is definitely less fatal with a wooden stick or our bare hands than with a gun. The film is another in the long list of movies which show the damaging effect of war to soldiers and how difficult it is for them to assimilate into society after undergoing a rather psyche scarring, electro-potential overdrive effect of war!