The Worst Police Officer New York's Ever Had

NOTE: THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM THIS SITE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 5/15/2008. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED, AND OUTGOING LINKS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED FOR REPUBLICATION. COMMENTS CAN BE FOUND HERE.

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I'm something of a late bloomer when it comes to my cinephilia. My family never had cable television, we didn't have a VCR until well into the 1980s, and throughout high school I only went to a few movies a year, usually of the sci-fi blockbuster variety. I was much more interested in computer games and music during my teen years, and I was practically oblivious to Frisco's diverse and thriving film culture. Ironically, this city boy had seen precious few non-Hollywood films until attending a small liberal arts college that offered free film and video screenings to students as partial compensation for living in a small Midwestern town with few cultural offerings attractive to its would-be-sophisticated student body. Suddenly I had easy access to screenings of films totally off my radar screen: Drugstore Cowboy, L'Enfant Sauvage, My Twentieth Century, Alice in the Cities, etc. I enjoyed going to see films I knew nothing about beforehand, but to be honest few of them floored me. I was still much more interested in music, including the healthy campus band scene.

Every weekend could be counted on to provide at least dorm party or house party featuring one or more of the many rock (or punk, metal, noise, funk, or jazz) bands made up of students. It seemed as if there were almost as many bands as there were students, but my favorite was the Shepherd Kings. What they lacked in traditional charisma or virtuoso musicianship, they more than made up for in creativity and eagerness to do absolutely anything to make their shows entertaining. Every show was an event that culminated in a whirlwind of purgative screaming, insane robots, amplified feedback, mass chaos and destruction and some kind of material, whether animal or vegetable or mineral, interacting with (okay, usually "thrown at") the audience. But along the way the Kings played a selection of well-crafted songs with titles like "Radiation" and "Jacques Cousteau". I always looked forward to a driving death march called "Lieutenant Bad", clearly inspired by the Abel Ferrara film Bad Lieutenant. Here's a link to an mp3 of a live recording of the song, which in 1997 was released on CD by Gourmandizer, a now-defunct indie label:

"Lieutenant Bad"

I suspect I get more out of listening to that than people who've never seen a Shepherd Kings live show might. I've probably heard the song a hundred times and I still can't make out a good portion of the lyrics being shouted in tag-team fashion by Jason Elbogen and Mike Kraus. I've pieced together that each line ticks off another debased transgression of "a corrupta police officera" (I want to say that bassist Jack Simpson was in my Latin class, but I could be misremembering, as I never knew any of the band members very well personally), including "breeding disease", "dealing angel dust", and being "dirtier than the streets". It's true that Johnny Breitzer's drumming is anything but metronomic, and it may help to be able to visualize what his playing style actually looked like. I'm sorry I'm unable to provide that image.

I'm not sorry, however, that today's Ferrarathon finally prodded me to see my first Abel Ferrara film, a decade after the Shepherd Kings played their last note, and after seeing the likes of Ed Gonzalez and Zach Campbell praise the director almost from the beginning of my entry into full-fledged cinephilia in the late 1990's. In writing about Bad Lieutenant it's tempting to model my form on that of the song, and list the countless transgressions of the Harvey Keitel character (referred to in the film only as "LT") in the approximate order they appear in the film. First: when he drops his kids of at school, he snorts some coke as soon as they've gotten out of the car. Then: we see him run into a fire trap apartment building, perhaps to chase down a perp? No, it's to score drugs from one of his regular dealers. Next: he stops a convenience store hold-up, but only to order the shopkeeper out the door and submit the robbers to a shakedown. Etc. Is there a single shot of LT in the film in which he isn't pictured doing something immoral, illegal, or at least grossly irresponsible?

It was an intensely disturbing film for me to watch. This is really a genre I try to avoid: an absolutely humorless character study, in which the character is inexorably descending into a drug-filled pit of Stygian torment. I usually just find them depressing, and compounded with my squeamishness around images of graphic self-destruction through substances (a reaction that kicked into high gear quite often during this film), it's really no wonder I'd put off seeing this for so long. The lead character's unchecked misogyny was extremely uncomfortable, too. If it wasn't for Ferrara's extremely stylish (though never over-stylized) direction, I wouldn't have been able to bear the film and its subject matter at all. Shot after shot won me over with its conjuring of a heightened reality. And some scenes conveyed a drugged-out unreality; at one point LT tenderly kisses his dealer's mamá after receiving a cash bribe big enough to make his gambling debts seem potentially far less disastrous. It feels for a moment like it might be a turning point for LT; the woman speaks only Spanish to him but exudes a maternal grace that seems like it could spark his salvation. But no, the very next scene is an expressionist nightmare; strung out on something clearly taken just after leaving the dealer's apartment, he staggers down the stairwell like Cesare let out of Caligari's cabinet.

The other aspect of the film that made it all worthwhile was, strangely, the ending. Yes, MAJOR SPOILERS are on their way. I've never been a Catholic or an especially religious person, but I found something very moving and beautiful about LT's nihilistic "redemption". The key scenes are the ones between LT and his fellow cops; at a grisly crime scene they're more interested in talking about their National League pennant bets than in doing their jobs or really dealing with the death and lawlessness surrounding them. Later, LT shows that he's spiraled much further out of reality than his fellow officers have, when he accuses the Catholic Church and Major League Baseball of being "a racket" in practically the same breath. First the Church is corrupt and a nun's rapists unworthy of the high bounty placed on their heads, then baseball is so fixed that the Mets must keep winning in order to force a game seven and raise more advertising revenue. It makes perfect sense that such a corrupt cop would see everything as a racket. So why does he keep putting his money on the Dodgers? Two possible reasons: either he is in such a self-destructive cycle that he wants to lose his bets and ultimately his life. Or, he doesn't really believe in the fix after all and wants his fellow substance abuser and traitor to New York, Darryl Strawberry, to hand him salvation with a Dodger victory. Either interpretation has fascinating repercussions for the end of the film; if it's self-destruction LT wants, it's self-destruction LT gets by mainlining heroin and parking his car in front of Trump Tower after sending his lifeline on the next bus out of town. But if the baseball Championship isn't fixed, then perhaps neither is Catholicism, something LT finally seems to admit just before the famous appearance of Jesus at the end of the film.

Whether LT is motivated by faith or by a suicidal urge, or by a twisted combination of the two (I tend to think it's this third option), I found something appealing about the neatness of the ending that I don't usually get out of most films of this genre. It works because LT is so clearly a fictional creation, where so many substance abuser movies focus on real or reality-based people. Somehow it's cathartic for this character who was never really portrayed as fully human but more as a personification of the most selfishly depraved human tendencies, to be able to be released from his abject existence. I won't go so far as to say I found the end uplifting, but at least it was a kind of relief. I really don't expect I'll ever want to see Bad Lieutenant again, but I'm very glad I saw it this once.

And I'm excited to try out more of Ferrara's work. Like Michael Guillen I hope Mary is among the titles announced as part of the 49th SFIFF tomorrow. And I definitely plan to explore more of the director's filmography with aid of this Blog-a-Thon. Ms. 45 and New Rose Hotel seem like the most likely next candidates for me to track down.

One last note: in one scene of Bad Lieutenant two children are watching a cartoon on television. A song plays: "We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again." The cartoon is the Fifth Column Mouse and it was directed by the most underrated of the great Warner Brothers cartoon directors, Friz Freleng, creator of Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, the Tweety and Sylvester team-up, Bugsy and Mugsy, the Pink Panther and a huge animated legacy. Despite sources to the contrary, I understand 2006 is Freleng's centennial year, and I haven't heard a peep about it from anywhere other than my mouth. Would anyone be up for a Friz Freleng Blog-a-Thon sometime between now and Freleng's August 21 birthday?

Vision Thing

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Today marks the 10th Anniversary of the release of Showgirls in director Paul Verhoeven's Mother Holland, and it didn't take much prodding for me to be convinced to join the appreciation party happening right now in the blogosphere. Yes, I actually like this perhaps inherently misogynistic film that rates a measly 3.8/10 from imdb voters and a 16/100 score on Metacritic. I count myself among the growing number of cinephiles whose views at the very least fit under the umbrella statement, "It doesn't suck."

I first saw Showgirls in the summer of 2001 when I scored free passes to Peaches Christ's summer series of witching hour cult movies called Midnight Mass. Showgirls was the second film in the series, and unquestionably the most raucous evening of those I attended (I skipped 9 To 5). The audience was packed with drunks, butch dykes, drag queens, and a few of us token "normals" who maybe didn't feel quite so normal anymore. I had the distinct impression that my friend and I were the only ones who'd never seen the film before, especially when most of the audience seemed to be yelling half the lines of dialogue at the screen. It was clear that at least we'd stumbled into a true cult phenomenon, and indeed Peaches has screened the film to sellout crowds at least once every summer since 1998. Well, how can you not enjoy a film on a certain level when surrounded by enthusiasm like that? I even got into the spirit of the evening and at one point around the midway mark yelled out (something I never do in a movie theatre) in my most nasal geek voice, "Excuse me, I'm trying to watch the movie!" It got a laugh, but there was some truth in my mock complaint. It was fun but difficult to untangle my reaction to the film from my response to the audience's shouts and cheers. I remember thinking that the film had utterly failed at being sexy if that was the intention, but I had the impression that the sterile plasticity of the sex and nudity just might have been part of a grander scheme to satirize the American Dream. Though I hadn't yet read Charles Taylor's review of the film, I agreed with his premise that Showgirls is intentional camp. I had been exposed to the idea of Verhoeven as satirist (through Zach Campbell for one) before seeing the film, and I found myself agreeing.

Here come spoilers in case you're still a Showgirls virgin...



I was totally caught off guard by Molly's rape scene, though. It's a truly disgusting and shocking scene, and sharply contrasts the good-natured humiliation, back stabbing, lying, pimping and whoring that make up the bulk of the film. Perhaps I was reacting less to the film than to the way the Midnight Masses became so much more subdued for this scene and its aftermath, but it felt like a real miscalculation to suddenly change the film's tone so radically. It took exposure to insightful analysis by the likes of Eric Henderson for me to start to understand the function of that scene in the film, and to finally see Verhoeven's creation as something more than a fun but flawed film.

So when the call went out for participation in a Showgirls-a-thon, I was ripe to revisit the film on DVD, which I finally did last night. What follows are a few thoughts and questions, not coherently gelled into any kind of argument whatsoever.

1. I own the soundtrack on audiocassette (it features excellent tracks from likes of Killing Joke, David Bowie, and Siouxsie and the Banshees) but I'd forgotten that in her initial hitch-hiking scene, Nomi changes the music from Dwight Yoakam (who she mislabels as Garth Brooks) to a song not found on my tape for whatever reason. "Vision Thing," by one of my favorite bands of the late eighties and early nineties, the Sisters of Mercy, is a song about America's cocaine-fueled aggression and imperialism. Though we don't hear the beginning of the song (which starts off with the sound of a coke sniff) I'm sure that whoever selected it knew what Verhoeven was up to; it's no coincidence that the Bowie song that plays in the dance club is "I'm Afraid of Americans". Oh, and guess where the Sisters are launching their 2006 American tour on March 22? Sin City itself, where the streets are lined with the tossed-away hamburger wrappers left by Nomis of the world over.

2. Having recently seen Footlight Parade for the first time and being struck by the incredible speed of the first half of that film, propelled of course by the actor who personifies "rapid-fire", James Cagney, I have to say Verhoeven doesn't quite capture that feeling of intense organizational energy though he comes close a couple of times. I'm not saying he's even trying to. The 1933 Lloyd Bacon/Busby Berkeley film Showgirls usually gets compared to is of course 42nd Street which is less fresh in my mind. But I definitely feel that Footlight Parade is worth a comparative look too, if only because the milieu seems somewhat more similar; aren't the depression-era girlie shows Cagney is trying to put together in that film some of the more apt equivalents to big Vegas shows like "Goddess"? And wasn't a big part of the appeal of Busby Berkeley's most lavish production numbers (like the ones in Footlight Parade) the feminine flesh on display, even if they never provided audiences the full frontal nudity required to bat eyebrows in 1995?

3. What kind of fantasyland is this where not only does someone suggest that Janet Jackson or Paula Abdul might star in "Goddess", but that the president of the hotel actually repeats the dismissed suggestion to the media? Or am I remembering 1995 inaccurately, with my post-Super Bowl, post-American Idol perspective clouding my sense of history?

4. What's with Cristal's underdeveloped Elvis fixation? Is there some character backstory or a key line that got trimmed out somehow?

5. Least-sexy sex scene in the film: Elizabeth Berkley flopping like a fish in the pool with her groin attached to Kyle MacLachlan's abdomen.

6. Spoilers again. That means you, mom; I know you haven't seen the film. Here's a wacky and/or trite interpretation of Nomi and Molly's relationship for everyone to point and laugh at. Let me know if this has already been proven or disproven somewhere I haven't seen (like in that Film Quarterly roundtable on the film that I still haven't read). Molly, who reiterates that she hasn't had sex in many a moon at the point Nomi comes into her life, represents Nomi's virginity (or born-again virginity if you will, since we later learn Nomi's a reformed Oaktown crack-whore). Though surrounded by wanton Vegas sexuality, Nomi's roommate remains chaste, ensuring that no matter what our natural-blonde heroine goes through in her escapades at the Cheetah club or with aspiring gynecologists by which I mean choreographers, her hymen remains intact. But when Andrew Carver and his gang force their camels through the eye of the seamstress's needle (sorry about that turn of phrase but I couldn't resist) it's as if Nomi has herself been raped. And though she gets revenge on the rapist, she also feels the blame and shame rape victims (I'm told) often do. Looked at this way, it seems that perhaps her departure on the road to Los Angeles is not so much a return to blind ambition but an escape from a community where she no longer can live in her own skin. Or is that what ambition always is anyway, an escape from our selves?

Lakes and Skies

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Three weeks ago I went to the Pacific Film Archive to view my first James Benning film, 13 Lakes. Though I'd heard of Benning and some of his films (particularly his California Trilogy) before, I only had a vague idea of what they might be like until two directors (Amir Muhammed and Jenni Olson) mentioned him as an influence on their films (Tokyo Magic Hour and The Joy of Life, respectively) at the San Francisco International Film Festival earlier this year. I was intrigued, as the most Benning-inspired segment was my favorite part of Amir's film, and Olson's film was my favorite of the entire festival.

And so I found myself sitting before the PFA's screen, watching thirteen carefully-composed, ten-minute-long shots of American lakes. And so I experienced a different way of watching a film than I ever had before. Changes in the images were usually slow and subtle, with very little of what is normally evoked by the term "screen movement". The first was Jackson Lake in Wyoming, and it was a study of the changing light and color at dawn, with Mount Moran and its reflection in the water as the canvas. After ten minutes and a fade to black, each shot gave way to a new lake with a new soundtrack, a new reflection of light on its surface, a new cloud cover, a new rhythm of rippling in the water. Though I've spent quite a bit of time in the outdoors, and even spent summers trying to teach teenagers about observing nature, I'm not sure I've ever really looked at something for even ten uninterrupted minutes before. Benning's film is a solicitation for viewers to look at his film as they might at a painting, or would if the oil in a painting could shimmer, swell, float, foam, flutter, or wave. It also asks us to look more closely at the natural world.

I won't pretend that I caught on right away. I nodded off for a bit in the middle of the second shot at Moosehead Lake, so its composition didn't burn into my brain like the other twelve did. I grew quite restless during the Salton Sea segment, even though I found it humorous to hear the constant soundtrack of jetskiers' engines, and then to see the vehicles unwittingly play peekaboo with Benning's camera. It wasn't until the calming Lake Superior shot that I started to realize the usefulness of taking the whole image in at once rather than darting my eyes around the screen looking for what little movement there was to be had. Still, this method worked better for some shots than for others. In fact, each lake seemed to suggest a slightly different way of looking and listening. At the speed at which wind blew snow onto the surface of Lake Iliamna it seemed almost unlikely that Benning and his camera weren't blown forward into the icy Alaskan water too. By contrast, the water in Crater Lake was tranquil enough to cast a perfect reflection of the rim of the dormant volcano in which it lies, which naturally encouraged attention to focus on changes in the soundtrack. The final shot left me exhilarated; the rippling waves of Oneida Lake moved toward the camera at just the right angle and speed to create the illusion of a weightless tracking shot. If I made sure to keep my eyes focused on the edges of the frame it seemed as if I were floating out over the lake, though never getting any closer to the opposite bank.

The next day I read this Senses of Cinema article on 13 Lakes. Its author, Michael J. Anderson, insightfully knits connections between Benning's film and the concept of the frame André Bazin explored when writing on Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game. The essay culminates in a discussion of the Lake Iliamna shot, leading to a fascinating conception of the cinema screen as an imagined portal to the world on the other side of Benning's camera. And then for the bizarre postscript: Anderson tries to define 13 Lakes as a "defiantly non-environmentalist" film, morphing an intelligent piece of film criticism into a conservative rant against what he sees as an "environmental orthodoxy."

I'm all for film and art that can bear a wide diversity of interpretations. I do not require films to express particular political points of view I ascribe to; in fact I find the majority of films that do so to be rather tiresome because of it. And some of my favorite films can be found on this list, most notably Fort Apache, Ruggles of Red Gap and I Know Where I'm Going! (though I think Ian Christie's Criterion DVD commentary makes a strong case for the latter film as exemplary of Britons' swing toward Labour at the end of World War II). Still, I absolutely consider myself an environmentalist, and do not want to let Mr. Anderson's conclusions stand unchallenged. Especially not at this moment in time, when one of the lakes captured in Benning's film, Lake Ponchartrain, has become so absolutely relevant.

I am open to a true interpretation of 13 Lakes as a non-environmentalist film. However, the evidence Anderson supplies in his argument does not come from the film itself, but from his evaluation of comments Benning made in response to audience members' questions after a screening:

...in one of the most telling moments of the post-film wrap-up, one viewer began her question by stating that she knows that the filmmaker is an environmentalist. To this, Benning quickly rejoined, glibly, that he is in fact not an environmentalist, as should be evident by the ten thousand miles he drove in the making of the film. While he later conceded that one of the points of the film is the condition of the lakes at the moment of filming, he held that he is an outsider to the movement. The point being made by Benning was not that he is unconcerned with nature, but rather that he does not agree with all of environmentalism's tenets.

More to the point, Benning does not share certain presuppositions of the environmentalist movement. Tellingly, Benning in a further elaboration of his divergence from this school of thought averred that the lakes themselves would be around long after the rest of us have gone. The implication of this observation, certainly, distinguishes the director from environmentalist orthodoxy: to Benning, the environment is resilient, whereas it is its frailty that instructs environmentalist orthodoxy.

Anderson wants readers to accept a straw man construction of an emotionally-based environmental movement ignorant of scientific fact. Such a construction can be seductive because everyone has encountered environmentalists who seem wholly unconcerned with facts, or those with a naive conception of the natural world they're trying to protect.

But Anderson tries to tar the whole of environmentalism with the same brush, especially when he quotes a Michael Crichton speech calling for an environmental movement "based in objective and verifiable science" without offering substantial evidence that it isn't already. Most environmentalists' conviction comes not out of an emotional or "religious" wellspring, but as a rational response to scientific facts. Facts that indicate a conflict between the current patterns of production and consumption in industrial and post-industrial societies and the health and overall quality of life for human beings, whether on a local or global scale.

Taking a closer look at Anderson's piece, there are indications in the body of his analysis that foreshadow his conclusions in the postscript, making it seem a little less like a non-sequitur. His very first paragraph minimizes "human incursion" in the film, ignoring the fact that several of the filmed lakes have been greatly shaped by human intervention. For example, the Salton Sea took its current form early in the last century with the flooding of a man-made canal, and would dry up if not for the irrigation of the Coachella and Imperial valleys. Lake Powell was just a stretch of the Colorado River until the completion of Glen Canyon Dam in 1963. And the visible clumps of algae floating on the edge of Lake Okeechobee are surely caused by agricultural nutrient runoff. Later Anderson states that the movement in 13 Lakes is created by changes "inherent in nature". The film provides a preponderance of evidence against this notion, most clearly in the Lake Pontchartrain shot in which on-screen movement is provided by an endless stream of automobiles driving across the Causeway that connects New Orleans to the bedroom communities on the lake's North Shore. This image evoked the relationship between the oil industry and the ecological condition of the lake when I saw it three weeks ago; post-Katrina it becomes all the more charged with significance.

A week after the 13 Lakes screening, I went back to the PFA to watch its companion piece Ten Skies and to hear Benning talk about his work in person. Perhaps because 13 Lakes had warmed me up for it, I found Ten Skies to be an even more beautiful and revelatory work. Because its ten shots were not literally grounded by a horizon line as in 13 Lakes, watching them was an experience even more alien to someone weaned on "traditional" forms of cinema. The painterly qualities of the light, color and form were all the more apparent, as were the constant changes in all three. And because the essence of the film was nothing else but the ephemeral vapor of clouds and smoke, completely isolated in the frame from any recognizable topography, watching the film seemed even more than for 13 Lakes an exercise in the act of seeing images outside the context of any text. A subject without matter, if you will.

Yet once again I could not view the film as completely divorced from environmentalist concerns. The second shot in Ten Skies is of smoke rising out of a fire. As I watched the battle between the dark smoke and the remaining patches of light blue for control of the frame, questions emerged. Was this a forest fire or a grass fire? How was it started? Was it a controlled burn or a wildfire? Does the helicopter on the soundtrack help answer these questions? The seventh shot showed white steam billowing out of what must have been some kind of industrial plant, and similar questions were raised. And the ninth shot contained little, dark streaks that I assumed were patches of smog or some other breed of pollution. Surely the filmmaker did not include such shots in his film and expect the viewer to ignore the consequences of human impact on the natural environment?

A question-and-answer session following the film provided me with an opportunity to solicit an opinion on this matter from Benning himself. Midway through the session, nervously gripping the microphone in my hand, I explained that I'd seen 13 Lakes the previous week and subsequently read an article claiming that he wasn't an environmentalist. I asked him to clarify whether he was an environmentalist, an anti-environmentalist, or neither, and to comment about how his films reflect his views on environmentalism. He began his answer by repeating the line reported by Anderson, that his thousands of miles of driving to these lakes surely conflicted with environmentalism. But he went on to clarify further that in fact he was quite concerned with the state of the environment; that he was an environmentalist after all, but simply not a practicing one. Which, he admitted, made him in fact a hypocrite, something he was not proud of.

I am not suggesting that this exchange, recorded with uncertain accuracy in my notebook and reproduced in the above paragraph, represents the last word on these two films and their relationship with environmentalism. I do hope those of you intrigued enough to have read this far will seek out Benning's films and see how your own reaction compares. (I know they've been programmed for the upcoming Vancouver International Film Festival, but am not aware of more Bay Area screenings scheduled) And if you disagree with my take on these films, or any others I've written about on this blog or in my occasional pieces elsewhere, let me know, either by e-mail or in the comments below.