by Mike Norton
It’s 1992, and New York City is bleeding. The streets are exhausted from having fought a war on drugs a decade earlier, and homicide rates, which peaked at the beginning of the decade, are still lingering around all-time high numbers. In Los Angeles, the notorious Rodney King riots were the culmination of pent up rage towards law enforcement that could be felt around the country. Cocaine, heroin, weed, whatever drugs you want, were spewed throughout the streets, no doubt fueling the murder rate and general unease of the community. Abel Ferrara’s film Bad Lieutenant captures this milieu, painting NYC as an oasis of sin and lost souls looking for redemption in all the wrong places. The type of place where throats are cut for the cocaine in the backseat, or nuns are raped, or teenage girls are killed in their cars, or teenage girls are sexually abused in their cars by bad cops. Unlike the New York of Ferrara’s earlier crime film, King of New York, which was presented more or less as a really big playground for one man to manipulate, the New York of Bad Lieutenant is a hell-on-earth wasteland.
We meet our titular Lieutenant (Harvey Keitel), never given a name, as he drives his kids to school after they have missed their bus due to their aunt taking too long in the bathroom. The Lieutenant asks them quite seriously “Are you men or mice?” and then tells them to tell their aunt to “get the fuck out” next time this happens. Right off the bat, the Lieutenant’s do-or-die mentality is realized. Later in the film, a Marine Corps tattoo is revealed on his arm, and he tells a bookie that he’s been dodging bullets since he was 14. Whatever this means, it’s clear that the Lieutenant has become hardened over the years and perhaps this explains his insane amount of drug usage (he snorts coke right after he drops his kids off) and general disinterest in anything that isn’t completely self-destructive. But underneath this exterior is that Catholic guilt that becomes the crux of Ferrara’s film. His search for salvation over the course of the film is mirrored with religious imagery, from the crucifix hanging from his car where he snorts coke, to his drunken stupor in a hotel room with two prostitutes, in which he is literally too drunk to stand straight, and he extends his arms to find his balance, emulating the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. This is one of the most painful images in the whole film, with Keitel delivering a naked (literally and figuratively) bit of acting that comes off as nothing but completely sincere. In Werner Herzog’s semi-remake of the film, Nicholas Cage delivered a more ironic, unhinged, almost self-mocking performance as the titular Lieutenant. In Ferrara’s film, Keitel infuses his performance with devastating honesty that elevates the material and makes it all the more painful.
The majority of the film is a ‘how low can you go’ trip down one man’s implosion of self-control. The Lieutenant shows little interest in his job, and even more disturbingly, in his family. He gets in over his head in gambling on the World Series, and when he is warned that the bookie he is betting with will blow up his house with his family in it if he doesn’t pay up the money he owes, the Lieutenant answers “Good, I hate that fuckin house”. Early on in the film, the Lieutenant investigates the double murder of two female teenagers in their car (this right after he snorted coke in his car). He examines the scene briefly, with the camera suggestively zooming in on one of the girl’s breasts from the Lieutenant’s point of view. This disturbing crime scene establishes the Lieutenant‘s disinterest in his job, as he wanders off to discuss bets on the World Series with other police officers, and also foreshadows a future scene in the film. In perhaps the most shocking scene that definitely helped the film achieve its NC-17 rating, the Lieutenant masturbates in the middle of the street to two females, one of them miming oral sex, whom he had stopped previously for having a broken taillight. Perhaps this juxtaposition of these two scenes suggest that the Lieutenant is doing equal damage to both pairs of the girls, the first by not investigating their murder, and the second by, well, you get the picture. His rampant sin is disturbing enough, but his disregard for the people he affects by sinning is even more disturbing and telling about his character.
The investigation of the rape of a nun, depicted in startling fashion by Ferrara, and the Lieutenant’s gambling on the World Series constitute the main plot of the film. If the Catholic undertones weren’t apparent by the first act of the film, the introduction of the nun’s character brings it all full circle. She admits to a priest in a confessional, in which the Lieutenant is spying on, that she knows the two boys who raped her, but has already forgiven them, and that she will not turn them in. The Lieutenant doesn’t understand the concept of spiritual forgiveness, since he is so self-absorbed in his earthly flesh. This reaches its boiling point when he has a vision of Jesus in the church, and he cries out to him “Where were you? You rat fuck!”, spilling out his existential confusion and misery in another scene of tour-de-force acting from Keitel. Like the rest of the film, it’s shot in a straightforward, gritty way by Ferrara, as he refuses to cut, letting the acting spill out through the screen and take on a life of its own.
Ferrara’s direction is never overly stylish, as it was in King of New York, and he shoots the action with handheld cameras, capturing the grit and misery of New York City during this time period. The hip hop culture had now expanded into a worldwide phenomenon, with West Coast artists in particular garnering national spotlight. But Ferrara doesn’t reference that genre here, as he did playfully in King of New York with Schoolly D’s Saturday Night. Still, the general unease between races, and authority figures, that hip hop articulated is prevalent at every scene. Albums like Straight Outta Compton and Live and Let Die released around this time perpetuated this mindset. The crime scenes depicted in Bad Lieutenant are like visualizations of similar scenes described in hip hop songs from the period. The song that Ferrara does actually use here is Johnny Ace’s Pledging My Love, a melancholic tune that is used heartbreakingly in the film’s final scenes.
The same question raised by detractors of Raging Bull, which I wrote about two weeks ago, can be positioned here- Why should we care about this guy? The protagonist of that film, Jake LaMotta, at least had boxing, with his championship belt giving him some sort of pride, and giving the audience some reason to care about him. But the Lieutenant here is the epitome of scum, never once showing one positive trait or anything resembling love and affection. He isn’t good at his job; hell, he never actually does his job, unless that job constitutes stealing cocaine from the back seats of crime scenes or pocketing the money from a stick up that he broke up. It’s not until the end of the film that the Lieutenant does something good, and this could be viewed more as an act of martyrdom than anything else. This devastating finale brings the film full circle, and for those who haven’t seen it yet, major spoiler alert for the next paragraph.
It is the Catholic belief that if you do good acts on Earth, you will be admitted into Heaven, as long as you repent for you sins beforehand. Throughout Bad Lieutenant, the Lieutenant has ample opportunities to do good acts, and each one of his supposed duties in the line of his work are failures to do said good acts. It’s not until the end of the film he finally manages to do something good, and shows some forgiveness. He discovers the two boys who raped the nun, and instead of booking them, he gives them $30,000 and puts them on a train out of town. I know what you’re thinking- what about justice? How is this a redeeming act? It’s the Lieutenant ‘s perverse way of forgiveness, not to mention it’s enough that he didn’t shoot them in the face, which he threatened to do and came pretty close to doing. Here, the Lieutenant could be viewed as a Christ figure, forgiving the rapists of their sins and offering them a new life. When he is shot and killed in the following scene, Christ comparisons come full circle. It’s a tragic, harrowing conclusion to an agonizing film, with the perfect final image of people gathering around the Lieutenant’s car, discovering his dead body and wandering around waiting for someone to do something.
