The Emotion of BAD LIEUTENANT

The following is my final paper for my Philosophy of Film class:



Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant is one of the grittiest, most searing cinematic examples of a broken soul’s need for redemption. It is often vile and disgusting, because the lieutenant is an utterly immoral man. It is also one of the most bold and intensely Christian films that I have ever seen. Christian in theme and imagery, though its heart belongs in the streets of New York with the junkies and lowlife’s, also crying out for salvation. Upon second viewing, it is an even more rewarding experience as a film that clearly takes its moral and spiritual ideas seriously and offers them a potency rarely seen in modern film. In this paper I will attempt to describe and evaluate the way Ferrara utilizes emotion in his film, particularly those of horror, identification, and ultimately the sublime.

Harvey Keitel gives an uncompromisingly powerful performance as the unnamed lieutenant, a corrupt New York City cop. Roger Ebert points out that, "The movie does not give the lieutenant a name, because the human aspects of individual personality no longer matter at this stage; he is a bad cop, and those two words, expressing his moral state and leverage in society, say everything that is important about him." His self-destructive behavior leads him to indulge in all of the vices that he should be combating. He leaves drug dealers alone in exchange for their product, he steals money from the thieves that just robbed a convenience store, he drinks until he passes out, he completely ignores his family, and he perversely, verbally rapes two teenage girls driving without a license in exchange for not turning them in. Also, he’s a gambler, and right now New York is eagerly waiting on the results of the seven game playoff match between the New York Mets and Los Angeles Dodgers. The lieutenant is betting it all on the Dodgers with some dangerous bookies, but the Mets seem to be making a historic comeback. In the middle of all of this, a nun is brutally raped by a couple of young hoodlums. She knows who did, but refuses to turn them in because she has already forgiven them, "Those boys. Those raging, sad boys. They came to me as the needy do, and like many of the needy they were rude, and like all the needy they took. Like all the needy, they needed." He can’t conceive of this kind of forgiveness, because if they can be forgiven, can he? At the absolute end of his rope – the Dodgers have lost and he can’t pay, strung out on booze and cocaine, and desperately seeking redemption – he begins to hallucinate and sees a vision of Christ standing before him in the church. "He no longer knows for sure what the boundaries of reality are," Ebert says. "His temporary remedies – drugs and hookers – have stopped working. All that remains are self loathing, guilt, deep physical disquiet, and the hope of salvation." At first he curses Jesus in His perceived absence, and then begins to beg for forgiveness, leading him literally to the feet of Christ. Eventually he finds the two young rapists, and in an unusual act of grace, gives them $30,000 dollars that he was going to use to help pay his gambling debts, and puts them on a bus to leave. He sets them free. In Ferrara’s allegory, New York City is a metaphor for a fallen and sinful world. With his act of grace, the lieutenant frees the young sinners to start over again in a better place. At the end, in an unbroken, static wide shot we see him in his car parked in front of Madison Square Garden. A car drives up alongside his, a voice can be heard, "Hey, cop!" Shots are fired, and the car drives off. The lieutenant has paid for his sins, but he has also been redeemed and had a chance to offer redemption to others. Harvey Keitel commented about the role, "I wanted to play this part because I have a deep desire to know God. Knowing God isn’t just a matter of going to confession and praying. We also know God by confronting evil, and this character gave me the opportunity to descend into the most painful part of myself and learn about the dark places."

It is difficult to describe or even evaluate Bad Lieutenant in terms of "horror," because it is not a horror film. The lieutenant is neither a monster, nor supernatural, nor a serial killer (he is, however, a less likable character than the cannibal, Hannibal Lector). Yet, there is still something disturbing and even horrible about his actions. There is something frightening about a man like this representing justice in a civil society. Perhaps it is frightening in a way that many horror films cannot be, in that we may never truly fear a monster which we know does not exist, but we can fear a self-destructive man. Perhaps this could be what Cynthia Freeland describes as "realist horror," though she uses that term primarily in reference to serial killers in film. She says, "Yet realist horror is a prevalent and important subgenre of horror that deserves consideration. Psycho and Peeping Tom, both released in 1960, initiated a significant shift in the horror genre. They chillingly depicted ‘ordinary’ men who were unable to connect with the reality around them. Due to traumas of childhood and sexual repression, so the story went, they became slashers." The lieutenant is an "ordinary" man (not subhuman or supernatural) who, at times, seems unable to connect with the reality around him. There also seems to be in him, to some extent, an underlying sexual frustration explaining his various encounters with prostitutes which never seems to involve sex (impotence?), as well as his, as one writer puts it, "queerly celibate (i.e., masturbatory) encounter with the two young women that he stops and harasses." Freeland goes on to say, "In realist horror, male sexuality is a ticking time bomb, a natural force that must be released and will seek its outlet in violence if it is frustrated or repressed." While impotence may not be an outspoken motivation for his actions, it is a possibility or at least a factor that can’t be ignored. Perhaps the most overt reference to horror in the film comes from a line spoken by a prostitute played by Zoe Lund, the films’ co-writer:

Vampires are lucky, they can feed on others. We gotta eat away at ourselves. We gotta eat our legs to get the energy to walk. We gotta come, so we can go. We gotta suck ourselves off. We gotta eat away at ourselves until there’s nothing left but appetite. We give, and give, and give crazy. Because a gift that makes sense ain’t worth it. Jesus said seventy times seven. No one will ever understand why, why you did it. They’ll just forget about you tomorrow, but you gotta do it.

Perhaps in this line could be found the source for a future Ferrara film, The Addiction. The interesting thing here is that to Ferrara, horror is not to be found in a monster, or a murderer, or even a man, but in life itself. Life, perhaps, in a fallen world. The real horror is that of decay and man’s selfish nature – both curses of the Fall. So in a way, this is a horror film, or at least a film about that which is horrible.

I am fairly certain that identification is not the point of Bad Lieutenant. In fact, Ferrara and Keitel seem to have intentionally crafted the character so that the audience would not empathize with him. He is utterly void of redeeming qualities. Perhaps we are not meant to identify with him. Perhaps he is intended to be identified with Christ. Simon Taylor observes:

As his daughter receives her first Communion, the lieutenant does not receive the sacrament but discusses his betting. Again we have the conjunction of his bad behavior and a crucifix. Here, however, Ferrara frames him in the same way as he frames the Christ on the crucifix. Ferrara is going further than a simple conjunction of religious imagery and the lieutenant and begins to suggest an identification between the lieutenant and Christ. We can see this elsewhere in the film. He goes to the home of a young dealer to whom he has sold drugs in order to collect the money he is owed. There are a number of religious pictures in this apartment, including a picture of Jesus’ face woven into a sofa. The lieutenant sits on the sofa right over the face of Jesus, as it were, in his place. Just as Ferrara has the lieutenants body form the image of the cross (itself suggesting some identification with Christ), so the lieutenant boldly takes the place of Christ. This occurs in the church. He picks up the statue of the Madonna that the rapists knocked over and lies down next to it. There is something of the cross in this pose, but most of all it resembles a pieta.

As well as this identification between the lieutenant and Christ, we twice see Christ himself during the film. Christ is never fully present in the film, only seen as a vision. The Christ we see is stripped to the waste, wounded and bleeding. He is the Christ of the crucifix. This visionary appearance of Christ is a departure from the realism that characterizes the rest of the film, and is unique to Bad Lieutenant in the whole of Ferrara’s body of work. The first time we see Christ is as the nun is raped on the altar of a church. As we watch this crime, the film cuts between the rape and an image of Christ on the cross, screaming in agony. The suggestion is as if it were happening to Christ, or at the least that Christ shares her pain. It later transpires the boys used a cross to penetrate the nun. The lieutenant sees Christ in the same church, where he has gone to plead with the nun for the names of her assailants. She refuses, saying that she has already forgiven them. The nun then leaves him, silently, giving him her rosary. She quite literally hands her cross to the lieutenant. He then drops to the floor and howls. It is at this point that he sees Christ, just as we saw Christ during the rape. He curses Christ at first and throws the rosary he has been given. Finally he breaks down and begs for forgiveness, "What am I going to do? You’ve gotta say something. You want me to do everything. Where were you? Where the fuck were you? I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ve done so many bad things! I’m sorry. I tried to do... tried to do the right thing, but I’m weak. I’m too fucking weak. I need you to help me. Help me. Forgive me, forgive me. Forgive me, please. Forgive me, Father." As he crawls toward Christ and kisses his feet, we see that in fact it is an old woman that has entered the church. It is she who has stolen the chalice and gives him enough information to find the rapists. The vision of Christ thus leads to his most significant identification with Christ as he takes the place of Christ in forgiving and setting free the two rapists. This identification is compounded by the fact that this costs the lieutenant his life.

Ferrara goes out of his way to insure that we will not make the mistake of identifying with the lieutenant in the sense that we condone or support his actions, and in the process he reveals a profound truth. Christ can identify with us even when we cannot with each other. Christ who is fully God and fully human, can identify with the violated nun as he can with a bad lieutenant seeking forgiveness. Most of the identification techniques described by Taylor are as much juxtapositions as they are identifications. The similar framing, the woven image on the sofa, and the pieta are as much reminders of the omnipresence of Christ as anything else. Christ is identifying with lieutenant, but the lieutenant cannot yet be identified with Christ because the lieutenant has not been redeemed or passed over into the Sacred. It is only when he receives the forgiveness of Christ that the identification can be made complete and satisfactory. Only the changed lieutenant can make an adequate identification with Christ, because it is at that point where the lieutenant is not merely passively identified with Christ, but he actively identifies with Christ by demonstrating grace and mercy to sinners. The identification is complete and a two-way process, not just one.

When one thinks of the sublime moments in this history of cinema, perhaps one might conjure up images from The Passion of Joan of Arc, or from the works of Bresson, Bergman, and even Chaplin, but I imagine that one is not likely to immediately consider Abel Ferrara and Bad Lieutenant. Yet I might go so far as to say that scene in which the lieutenant encounters Christ is sublime, not merely because of the way that I "felt" while watching the scene, but because it seems to adhere to the definition of sublime. Cynthia Freeland claims:

To call an object "sublime" means, first and most centrally, that it calls forth a characteristic conflict between certain feelings of pain and pleasure – it evokes what Burke labeled "rapturous terror." On the one hand, the sublime prompts a painful feeling sometimes designated as terror, fear, or dread. But the sublime object does not cause merely pain or terror, but also "rapture": we find it exhilarating and exciting. Kant and Burke emphasized that so long as we are safe, the ineffable, great element before us in the awesome object evokes a certain intellectual pleasure of astonishment or elevation. Kant thought that this pleasure was tied to an awareness of features of our moral selves . . . A final feature of the sublime is that it prompts moral reflection.

It is painful to watch the completely broken cop rant about his need for forgiveness and help – at that moment, my heart goes out to him. If I am correct in describing this as a kind of horror movie, or a film about that which is horrible, then one might understand the feelings of terror. One is, in fact, likely to be fearful – to feel a "rapturous terror" – in the presence of Christ. I probably need not even argue that the moment of spiritual redemption and salvation is the most sublime of all experiences, and Ferrara captures that feeling when his character, who so clearly needs that redemption and renewal (as we all do), receives it. And by its very nature – the imagery of salvation, the church location, the presence of Christ, and the consistent religious iconography – the film prompts moral reflection. The lieutenant is awakened to the "awareness of features of [his] moral self." If the salvation imagery is not sufficient to constitute a sublime moment, then I don’t what is. Ferrara’s film is more overtly dark and viscerally intense than many of its sublime cinematic counterparts, but it is through great darkness that the victory of the light shines most brightly.

Bad Lieutenant is an experience of a film is set in the horrible darkness of the human soul, though manages to make an identification between the lieutenant and Christ himself, leading to a moment of sublime victory. It is a film that knows nothing of tameness and subtlety, belonging to that type of street-tough New York maverick filmmaking, comparable to the early works of Martin Scorsese. Its boldness is a result of the palpable, all-consuming passion of the filmmaker’s, primarily Abel Ferrara and Harvey Keitel. It is an admirably direct, no-holds-barred reminder of our need for salvation, and the necessity of grace in a fallen world.