In his dogged addiction duet, Ferrara craves for the hardships of peripheral existence in the Big Apple. Using vampires as metaphors, he strips the addicted of their reflection, and asks us what an empty mirror means.
1992’s Bad Lieutenant, directed by cinematic rebel rouser Abel Ferrara, felt to me like a coming out of sorts – a declaration of morally agnostic storytelling, a film that says to its audience: “It’s all up to you.” Its titular character, played with a ferocious vigour by Harvey Keitel, meanders throughNew York, haunted by a severe pain in existence which he tries to relieve by tormenting his body through substance abuse. It is a film that wears its heart on its sleeve, as not only the characters but also Ferrara’s lens seem to inject themselves with pure heroin. Unlike Cronenberg’s similarly controversial Crash a few years later, Bad Lieutenant doesn’t look at the extreme behaviour of its characters through the security of a piece of glass, as if looking through the window in a zoo that separates gorilla Bokito from grabbing on to you. In Bad Lieutenant, Ferrara and screenwriter Zoë Lund place their viewers in the backseat of the Lieutenant’s patrol car as it roars through the seedy underbelly of NYC, thereby attacking the quasi-disinterested comfort of the cinema seat. They engage in what feels like the cinematic equivalent of teabagging an audience. Scenes alternate at a relentless pace between shots of cocaine, the rape of a nun, spoonsful of heroin, anda particularly harrowing one where two underage girls are verbally molested, as if you’re standing right next to them. Wakey-wakey, this won’t be just nice ride-along, you dig. This will be a cocaine-driven nervous breakdown, where the only moments of relief are fuelled by heroin. No wonder it seems that Ferrara has confessed that “the director of that film needed to be using, the director and the writer—not the actors.”
Ferrara’s films often balance on a fine line between exploitation and arthouse cinema, bridging the gap in moments that ‘over-exploit,’ as it were. In Bad Lieutenant’s key scene, screenwriter Lund plays a small part. Her character is the Lieutenant’sheroin-angel, saving him from the stress of the daylight. She says to him: “Vampires have it easy. They feed on others … We have to eat away at ourselves. 'Til there's nothing left but appetite.” The line is the thematic core of Bad Lieutenant. An expression of Lund’s own philosophy of addiction – she was noted to ‘love’ heroin, and made it her elixir of life and eventual death in 1999. It resonates hollow in such a profound way, as if pulling a rug to give way to an underlying void, providing Lund with a reason (or excuse) to float on in her morbid habitual ritual, disinterested in sin. And with every hit she gives to the Lieutenant, his reflection seems to faint, little by little, not much unlike a vampire. In his follow-up feature, The Addiction from 1994, Ferrara explores the vampiric potential in addiction stories further by flipping Lund’s haphazard formula – it makes for a perfect yet dogged double bill. The film questions whether vampires actually find it easy to feed on others. Frequent Ferrara-collaborator Nicholas St. John directly opposes Lund’s addictive philosophies as he writes this screenplay not from experience – St. John never ‘used.’ The Addiction is written more in the vein of a philosophical dissertation, a theory that leaves praxis to the actors, as mirrored by its main character. Lili Taylor in a career-defining performance plays Kathy, a graduate philosophy student at NYU in the process of writing her final thesis. One night, she is pushed into an alley by a mysterious woman who corners Kathy and gives her a chance: “Say ‘go away’, like you mean it.” Kathy can only mutter, “please,” and gets bitten in the neck.
Kathy slowly sickens into a vampiric (non-)existence. Her new dependency to feed on others forces her at first to extort blood from a hobo using a needle, before she, little by little, starts taking her own victims, demanding them to say ‘go away’ like they meant it. “The unsaved don’t recognize the sin in their lives.” One night, Kathy meets an older vampire called Peina, played by Christopher Walken. He barely uses, he doesn’t want to stick out like a sore thumb among people. He wants to blend in. Peina tries to help Kathy, urging her to get a grip on her addiction, and proceeds to feed on her sucking her dry. Kathy clamours in pain and slits her wrists, but nothing comes out. “You can’t kill what’s dead. Eternity’s a long time. Get used to it.”
The Addiction at a mere 82 minutes is overwhelmingly rich in nihilistic propositions and questions on guilt and pain in the eye of an all-consuming void. Its own habitual relish is formed in a Nietzschean paradox: abysses that turn your gaze and look straight back at you. Whereas the vampire in previous incarnations on the silver screen more often is used to delve into worlds of forbidden fruits and hidden sexualities, The Addiction re-locates this peripheral existence and traps its vampires in eternally recurring cycles of self-destruction, in search of self-revelation. Unlike Bad Lieutenant, we no longer drive along in the search of salvation by back seating in Keitel’s patrol car, ever speeding towards certain doom until the cord snaps. Instead, St. John crafts his argument by presenting a vicious cycle, without an end, a habitual dependency without ritual relish, eternal existence in nothing. And a nothing that always looks back in the absence of a reflection in the mirror at that.
But this film doesn’t play like an academic dissertation. It’s a killer horror-film with exploitative edges, firmly rooted in the streets of New York, where each side-character may well be a wandering local accidentally entering the frame. At one point, a street hustler confronts Kathy on the street and insists on them sleeping together. Kathy responds by engaging his want, isolating him, before demanding him to tell her to ‘go away’ like he means it. More than just a mere moment of female empowerment for Kathy, this moment taps into the banality of evil, residing in the dark heart of every person. I don’t enjoy this moment for the way it instigates this type of thinking in me, but for the way it perfectly invokes the sweet taste of blood, followed by a vile aftertaste. The film’s conceptual paradoxes match its emotional paradoxes. I need some more, where is it at?
The Addiction has its own twisted and morbid sense of humour. It blends its comedic tone with a sense of immediate danger. No situation ever reveals itself to remain one thing as any form of tension, be it dangerous, comic, or orgasmic, can and will be broken into unforeseeable ways – similar to one of the film’s core inspirations Naked Lunch (“One more shot – tomorrow the cure”). When Kathy walks down the street, Cypress Hill’s snarkily jovial I Wanna Get High plays, right before she’s sucked into the abyss of an alley. And the film’s climactic explosion of excess starts off as the butt to a sickly joke, as Kathy decides ‘to share’ in what she has learned throughout her academic career.
Cinema in its finest form functions much like a mirror. It reflects as much of what we bring to it back at us, as that it is actually projecting something onto us. What strikes me most about The Addiction, is how it intends to strip its viewer bare of their reflection, and show them what that entails. It traps its vampires in an eternal loop where self-revelation can only equal annihilation of self, as Kathy puts it in a concise utterance of Deleuzian fatalism. And she is doomed for eternity to repeat this with each screening, over and over again.
4.5 / 5 stars
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