Dangerous Game
Ferrara started making films with his friend, and writer, Nick St. John
on 8mm when he was an adolescent in New York. There are rumors that he
made porno films before The Driller Killer, but he won't talk
about that (if it's true, it's not much of a surprise). His debut, shot
in his Union Square loft, is a late 70's period piece (the director
himself--under the pseudonym "Jimmy Laine"--plays an artist who lives
in a menage ˆ trois with a couple of downtown chicks, and the ambiance
is very Bowie/Lou Reed). Drive-in obligations are fulfilled (lesbian
sex in the shower, repeated killings using guess what as a weapon), but
the sensibility that underlays the action is decidedly the Ferrara I've
been describing. This surprisingly elegant looking film constantly
plummets into chancy areas (very frank footage of homeless people, long
stretches devoted to a seventh-rate new wave band hanging out and not
practicing that get the rotting sybaritism of that time perfectly). The
progression away from generic obligations and dramatic lynchpin
structures is steady thoughout each successive picture--the
hallucinatory Ms. 45, the Chinese-Italian Romeo and Juliet film
China Girl, the decadent gun-blasting escalation of King of New
York (that's the film where he starts to find his now trademark
quietness), Bad Lieutenant and Snake Eyes . The
exception is the 1984 Fear City, which has a nice feeling for the world
of Manhattan strip joints but which devolves into a hero fighting his
demons and finding the killer in the process--remind you of 10,000
other movies you've seen? His oeuvre expands and contracts like an
accordion --sometimes the episodes of Miami Vice, the pilot
movie for Crime Story, Cat Chaser (based on an Elmore Leonard
novel, filmed without his regular team and straight to video) count,
sometimes they don't. Right after Bad Lieutenant he shot a fast,
tough widescreen remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (for
$20,000,000, his biggest budget by a mile) that barely came out in
theaters ("It's an awesome piece of material...they should make one
every year."). These money in the bank projects not only keep Ferrara
healthy and working, they also enrich and reflect back on his more
personal work. The reality of genre filmmaking is treated with the same
clarity as the reality of New York in the other films. And while our
most vaunted filmmakers perch themselves high above the working stiffs,
Ferrara sullies himself regularly and stays at ground level with
projects on demand. There is a healthy tension in his work between
exploitation and thoughtfulness: he dives into his demi-monde of
muggers and pimps with a relish beyond the decorum of more haloed
directors like De Palma or Altman. He "exploits" his characters the
better to nose dive into their world.
Many of his admirers thought that he had permanently soared off into
the ether with Snake Eyes. I heard stories about the
shoot--fast, single takes, Abel sitting in the corner having a glass of
wine and letting the film direct itself. The finished product bears out
those stories. This wild, mean, smart movie about confessional
filmmaking and the business around it is the work of a director
interested in letting different elements--film within film, scenes of
family life, video rehearsals that may or may not be staged --collide
at full throttle ("With Snake Eyes, Abel Ferrara signs his name
to a film in which he is ultimately not just foreman as well as
architect but also active spectator and implicit and central actor,"
wrote Camille Nevers in Cahiers du CinŽma). The interaction
between Mother of Mirrors, the film within the film (James Russo
and Madonna as a suburban couple in a state of war: she's found God and
he wants to continue the promiscuous lifestyle they've led), and the
domestic life of Eddie (the director, played by Keitel) is just that:
we don't see them engineered so that the fiction "illuminates" the
reality. Instead they butt up against one another, and the film is
about the war between filmmaking and domesticity. Of course, the most
effective way to allow collisions to happen is to stay as uninvolved as
possible. "He's gonna stand where he wants to; I'm not gonna push him
around on the set," Ferrara said in response to a question of mine,
something about the "powerful effect" of cutting back and forth between
Keitel in dark glasses and the bright chrome burnish of the scene from
Mother of Mirrors (shot on a different film stock). "In other
words, he's gonna stand where he's gonna stand...I mean, he was
basically directing that film, so we were shooting a documentary about
the making of that movie, Mother of Mirrors. And that was
Harvey's film. Or Eddie's film."
The scenes between Keitel and his wife (played with a beautifully raw
simplicity by Ferrara's wife Nancy--the part was originally offered to
director Jane Campion) have an off-handedness and mysterious intent
that is fascinating when stacked against the harsh histrionics of
Mirrors or the embarrassing Actor's Studio dialogue of the video
rehearsals. These scenes are quick, undramatic (eating dinner, making
love, sitting by the poolside), and in this context the sweet
domesticity takes on a hyperrealistic edge. Eddie is in such a rush to
get into the nightmare of moviemaking that his life with his family
becomes itchy, annoyingly stable. Filmmaker Olivier Assayas admires
these sequences for the way they catch the "obscenity of everyday
life." The way the filmmaking scenes are structured, we always arrive
"in media res," the imagery is harsh and discordant; they represent
another world, a mixture of hard work, confession, outlandish behavior,
and complete unreality. Typically, there is nothing made of Eddie's
"stature" as a director; it's all about the work.
One scene in Snake Eyes shakes things up spectacularly. We go
from an overheated moment which has Godard's point-making simplicity
(Russo has been fucking Madonna; he gets a call from Keitel saying,
"I'm looking at the tapes and she's good;" Madonna tells Russo that she
slept with him only to get into character; she leaves and Russo's drug
dealer/girlfriend appears; "Did she give you a blow job?" she asks,
then provocatively licks his hand before she bites it; he slaps her and
tells her never to do anything like that again) to a drifting camera in
medium-shot before a mirror with a black band down the middle, under a
whitish bathroom light. You start to wonder what you're looking at, if
Keitel as Eddie set up this shot, if Ferrara did, if director of
photography Ken Kelsch did. A title appears on the screen: PRINCIPAL
PHOTOGRAPHY. As Eddie, Keitel calls out to "Ken," his D.P., to check
the framing. Madonna appears before the mirror, getting herself into an
overwrought emotional state appropriate to the scene to be shot. "What
do you want me to do?" she calls out over and over. Again, whether she
is in character, or whether she is acting, or whether she, Madonna,
must prepare herself emotionally to play the role of the actress
playing her role, is debatable, ambiguous. Russo appears in the
background being made up in a garish light. "I mean, I'm not getting my
picture taken by fucking Richard Avedon right now, you know," she says.
Is that line scripted or is it Madonna getting pissed off? Periodically
there are breaks. And we are waiting. A certain pressure is building
that becomes utterly fascinating: we are in a closed space without any
visual (not to mention dramatic or reality) coordinates. Madonna
becomes more distraught, actressy. Keitel appears and reassures her,
and also encourages her ("You go where you have to go"). It is unclear
whether Madonna is waiting for the crew, whether the crew is waiting
for Madonna, whether or not this is scripted. An eagle-eyed viewer who
gets a glimpse of the clapboard will see, "Snake Eyes A.
Ferrara, K. Kelsch." Did they just use a clapboard for the movie within
the movie and forget to put Mother of Mirrors on it, or was
Ferrara encouraging the ambiguity, or is this really the beginning of a
shot for Snake Eyes? And there is no change--Madonna still seems
to be getting ready, or is now ready and we have not been aware that
the scene has started. Then the light shatters and a flashlight is
pointed at us--there's been a cut. Russo appears next to Madonna.
"Where's he hiding? In the medicine cabinet next to the tampons and the
aspirin?" A deep, ominous synthesizer chord sounds. Russo appears in
the most garish grand guignol close-up, spouting obscenities at Madonna
("I've seen you suck the cocks of CEO's."). Back to Russo and Madonna,
now from a different angle, doubled before the mirror. The scene from
Mother of Mirrors seems to be proceeding as if cut and
scored--but is it Snake Eyes that is scored? Cut to rehearsal
video of Keitel.
Dangerous Game
Is this sloppy filmmaking? A pretentious mishmash? Is Ferrara just
lazily repeating a provocative game of fiction and reality he picked up
from late 60's movies? Not to belabor the comparison with Godard, but
there's a parallel to be made between Godard's lionization (he's the
apex of cinema, every film is a masterpiece) and the lack of respect
accorded Ferrara, because both are strategies for avoiding the hard
work of understanding. The world is filled with too many film critics
who have gotten fat and developed the slovenly habit of comparing every
movie that comes out to other movies. The taxonomy gets smaller and
narrower, and Ferrara and Godard are both left out in the cold. "What's
interesting in the cinema," wrote the late French critic Serge Daney,
"is never the symbol itself but its fabrication, the symbol-becoming of
the smallest object." The same is true of categories like
"Pirandellian," "surrealistic," or "game of illusion and reality." You
must pay close attention to what Ferrara is doing before you
categorize him.
And what is Ferrara doing in a scene like this? First of all, he is
stranding us, cutting us adrift from all but a few reference points. At
a time when things are so stale, when every object seems to have a
fixed meaning in every goddamned movie (anything neon is a ticket to
instant sleaze, a convertible on the road equals...freedom!), it's a
breath of fresh air to see things in such a loose perspective without
any sort of moral grid behind them. But we are also seeing the
hierarchy of life, filmmaking and the reality of the film within the
film dismantled. The tortuous work of making Mother of Mirrors
and the superreal creatures in it who are dancing a violent, obscene
pas de deux overwhelm Snake Eyes, but we keep returning to the
small, potent family vignettes, the better to ponder the value of so
much naked soul-searching artwork when Eddie ends up alone, destroying
his home life in the name of honesty. No tidy script with nicely
planned scenes about the filmmaking process this time. With the hard
dedication of a Rodin, Ferrara carves out a wrenchingly physical
representation of movie work (which is the point of collapsing the
barriers between realities), and creates a collapsible and ambiguous
sense of onscreen time that approximates the lost hours of making a
film.
Where Ferrara is decidedly un-Godardian is in his true blue faith in
actors. "You gotta be there for the actor--that's the point of
directing," says Ferrara. "You gotta know where he's gonna be and you
gotta be there to give it to him. 'Cause when the bottom line comes,
he's the movie. The camera's not on the director." However, he takes
the opposite route from Cassavetes or Pialat, who structure their films
according to their actors' emotional truth and thoroughly defined
conceptions of character. Character for Ferrara is never an independent
concept--it is always deeply rooted in theme and place. If it exists at
all in his world, it is a series of biological drives, environmental
influences. His people are abstract in comparison with the
self-motivated automatons in standard $50,000,00 Hollywood issue ca.
1994. For instance, we don't even know the Bad Lieutenant's
name. He is defined only by his onscreen actions and the environment
pressing down on him. The same is true of the driller killer, Ms. 45,
the Romeo and Juliet of China Girl, the king of New York and Eddie in
Snake Eyes. In a sense Ferrara is an actor's dream, because his
work is so rooted in concrete action. But he is also extraordinarily
demanding of actors, because they are required to go so far. "I'm
expecting you to fuckin' die: you're still alive, therefore
you're not workin' hard enough," is Ferrara's Snake Eyes-like
pep talk to actors, and only the gamest are attracted to him--Walken
and Keitel, Lili Taylor (who just starred in Ferrara's upcoming black
and white vampire movie, The Addiction, shot in 20 days), Russo
and Caruso, Madonna.
Walken accentuates his somnambulant vampire side for King of New
York. In his white suits, staring off at the horizon of Manhattan,
he recites his dream of building a kids' hospital with money made from
his cocaine empire, in his patented cracked, hypnotic drone voice. Only
Ferrara and St. John would dream of creating a character like this, the
logical extension of the asinine oceanic urge to "clean things up" that
results in abstract drug wars or ecstasy over the fall of the Berlin
Wall without consideration of the consequences. He is a perfect
character for the end of an era when the American government was
selling arms to an arch enemy in the middle east to fund an illegal war
in Central America. And Walken has just the right tragically
compromised, visionary demeanor. The king of New York ends up gut-shot
and dying in the back of a cab after a torrential bloodbath that seems
to cover the whole city. This altruist is surrounded by cops with guns
drawn, and the aura that Walken gives off--is there another actor who
can hollow himself out so thoroughly?--inspires the driver to jump out
of the cab and run.
What to do with New York City? Bad Lieutenant, which is
Ferrara's most epochal movie thus far, might be the brutal answer to
King. St. John turned down this project because he's "not into
the asking questions type of screenwriting or filmmaking."
Paradoxically, where King of New York seems more unresolved, Bad
Lieutenant ends with a painful, gut-wrenching act of forgiveness.
This movie has been down-graded by everyone from Roger Ebert to Mike
Leigh as a collection of actors' scenes (Leigh even compared it
unfavorably to his own gaseous and vastly overrated Naked, a
piece of patchwork that really and truly is a collection of actors'
scenes). In truth, few recent movies, American or otherwise, have shown
such intelligence and rigor at work behind the camera. The film glides
forward like a silent pageant made up of tableaux in which Keitel's
lieutenant drifts in and out of the spotlight. Rather than the
dog-tired melodramatics of a junkie gambler in debt up to his ears,
there is the material reality of Keitel self-destructing against the
landscape of the streets of New York. Outside of a handful of directors
(Hou-Hsiao Hsien, Assayas, Pialat, Edward Yang), find me another
director today who trusts himself enough to let his camera do the work,
instead of stuffing a string of explanatory speeches down his
characters' throats. The cavernous and untended streets of the Lower
East Side, the loneliest, darkest back wall of a tenement stairway, the
Korean deli abuzz with recriminations at hooded black youths, the
sunken cheeks and serpentine body of the lieutenant's smack connection
(Zoe Lund, Ferrara's old friend--she was Ms. 45--and the co-author of
the script), the hopped up voice of the radio call-in host who freaks
on anyone who's lost faith in the Mets, the dim whiteness of a hospital
corridor accompanied by the most obscene Schoolly D. rap ("He say: your
granny? She's a dyke/And your little sister too?/She's so low she sucks
the dick of a little maggot")--each of these elements is Keitel's
co-star. If there's a star trip it's not onscreen. He recedes into a
tiny kitchen corner to cook up some smack and gets just as quiet and
tranced out as Lund. His big scenes--full frontal nude freakout, the
masturbation scene, a confrontation with Christ and his final anguished
howl in pressure cooker close-up--are deep, deep in the grain of the
movie. As a performance, of course it's a marvel, but it's also an
egoless collaboration with the director.
Part 3
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