Madonna
No one has worked harder than this scrappy New Yorker with the hard-boiled
delivery to render the sense of the city as a tangible phenomenon. Ferrara
and his A-team of loyal, dedicated artists (Ken Kelsch, sound mixer Michael
Barofsky, St. John and Lund) have spent a career trying to capture the way
it feels to walk through New York, to shout across one of its streets, to
loiter next to one of its crime scenes, to witness its depravities and live
with them every day. But he's not just a big city chronicler. He is a completely
unsentimental realist (in the moral and biological senses) who sees things
squarely in material terms, and on the level of forces at war. Listen to
him talk about his own situation in the business. I asked him whether he
wanted more money for his films. "No. We want to make our own movies,
our own stories. It's like runnin' guns...I think about what films I wanna
make and how I'm gonna get 'em made--that's my concern." Open
the pages of any film magazine and you're bound to find an interview with
a director who is crying in his or her beer because they can't find $30,000,000
to make some star-studded project. For Ferrara, this does not make sense--how
can you make a new movie if you fret about lost projects? "In France,
[Snake Eyes] opened in, like, 140 theaters across the country. You
know, I mean, a film like that..." Ferrara knows it is absurd to expect
the general public of any country to embrace a film as difficult as Snake
Eyes; by the same token, he knew it was a necessity that he make it
for those few who do. He knows his films are not "investments in worldwide
entertainment" as he characterizes Jurassic Park, and that it's
absurd to try to shove art down people's throats. "Whose fault is that?"
he said of the presence of Jurassic on 70% of French screens. "Let
people see what they want to see. Are you gonna tell them to go see fuckin'
Carl Dreyer films?" Even when it comes to his hero, he is unflinching.
When I lamented the fact that Godard had not had a commercial release in
America for seven years, Ferrara just laughed and said, "Sometimes
you're on, sometimes you're not."
Indeed, his own movie about moviemaking is the only one I know of to invoke
the Engulf and Devour policy of CAA (Creative Artists Agency), the hugely
powerful talent agency that may well be the greatest influence on Hollywood
filmmaking today. Eddie invites Sarah (Madonna, who, as a powerful and bitchy
TV actress, has her one right role) to dinner and she brings her agent.
Their hidden intention is to take Frank, Russo's character, out of the movie.
"We'll back whatever choice you want," the agent says. "What
do you mean back whatever choice I want--you want to get rid of the guy."
Eddie then puts the agent on the spot by pointedly asking her if she could
provide him with an alternate list of non-CAA clients.
"What is the protocol?" said Ferrara about Hollywood, which he
characterized as "a fuckin' skank street, a bunch of fuckin' shoot-from-the-hip,
rock 'n' roll dudes...the biggest freaks money can buy are rockin' on all
night. They're fightin' for survival..." The crap that you read in
Premiere about "creative differences" or "mulitple
rewrites" is just quaint language for back-stabbing raised to the level
of an art form. Supreme realist that he is, Ferrara knows that this is what
happens when vast amounts of money are involved. His one to ten million
dollar budgets (Snake Eyes cost ten, partly because Madonna was in
it) keep people out of his hair. His tough guy act (late 70's drug culture
in style: "She's a fuckin' jerk... Like we sit around taking out the
best scenes in the movie to spite her. You know how parnoid you gotta be
to fuckin' say something like that?," he said when I brought up Madonna)
also serves this function. In that sense he's strikingly similar to the
Hollywood auteur-legends like John Ford and Howard Hawks who dodged every
question about being an artist that left-brained adolescent interviewers
threw them with the "I'm just a storyteller doing my job" number.
In order to function in that system they could have no pretensions to artistry
in public--that's the brutal fact. As for Ferrara, he's a thematically driven
director who is uninterested in polishing up his imagery and his world view
the better to sell himself, a rare item in American cinema these days. The
only comparable example is Jon Jost, the cranky maverick who has made a
slew of movies, each for what a Hollywood production spends on the gaffer's
lunch. Listening to Ferrara speak, always on a plane of bedrock necessity,
you realize how much time most filmmakers spend justifying themselves, assuring
their interrogators that they have a serious theme (like Tarantino proclaiming
to the multitides that the pornographically violent Pulp Fiction
is a film about "redemption"). Ferrara is not interested in making
movies--he's interested in, as he said, making his movies.
If Ferrara has weak spots, like an attraction to ratty scene hogs like Caruso
and Russo, a penchant for bluntly obvious dialogue ("I need these things!
I need these things!!!" screams Russo in a Mother of Mirrors
scene to proclaim his attachment to decadent materialism), an abundance
of tits and ass that prompted his wife to walk out of a New York Film Festival
screening of King of New York, they are overshadowed by his virtues.
For most film directors, moral ambiguity means championing one side of an
argument and portraying the other in a "sympathetic light." In
his pragmatic detachment, he may be the only director with the patience
to portray situations from the point of view of the conflict. "Just
because a cop is wearing a badge, why should he be a hero?" said Ferrara
about King of New York. "A cop's making $40,000 a year, these
guys [drug dealers] are making $40,000 a day, you see? It's like a whole
big difference. You're a cop and you're gonna come on with this moral righteousness...Now,
even outlaws live by rules, you know, honor among thieves. So I think it's
down to the individual." Only someone who keeps their outsider-fringe
credentials painfully intact could state the problem with such clarity.
I'm convinced that those who are unwilling to see the germaneness of Ferrara's
work are blinded by a simple matter of taste, and in the end that's the
least defensible position towards any work of art. When I saw Snake Eyes
in a theater (after it had been recast as Dangerous Game and snipped
in order to get an R rating. "We had to go through a whole song and
dance with this thing. It didn't end up being much, but it's the attitude
of it: why, why, why?"), the audience chuckled mildly throughout the
movie but I had a strong feeling that they liked it. I also knew that if
asked, they would say it was a bad movie, so jarring are its Actor's Studio
trappings and so slim is its resemblance to anything else on view at the
moment (except Godard's recent work: Germany Year 90, Helas Pour Moi,
his tough and inquisitive Histoire(s) du Cinema videos). But in an
era when the 12-step mentality rules, a film that posits a conflict between
family stability and artistic self-vampirism on equal terms and with such
fierce clarity poised on the razor's edge of chaos is a shining singularity.
There's a tyranny of consensus that rules in the film business, where talent
agencies, film magazines, studios, film critics and pretty boy wunderkind
directors operate in perfect, well-oiled synch. In Ferrara, there is finally
a cause worth defending. His work is like a wrench in that machinery, busting
up all sorts of categories and expectations. The films don't obfuscate or
dissemble in order to be liked, and they have a logic that leads step by
step to devastating outcomes in which action and theme are so solidly bonded
that they become nearly indistinguishable. Ferrara speaks of the ending
of Bad Lieutenant with typical nonchalance. "Once he says, 'How
could she forgive you for something like that [the nun forgives her rapists],'
well, the next step is, 'If she did, then I will. But you, as the rapist,
you've gotta understand what she did. Your life ain't worth shit. In fact,
I could just, in one second, blow your fuckin' brains out and no one would
give a shit. But I'm not gonna do it, so you've gotta live with that.
You're gonna be a better person for it, I'm gonna be a better person for
it.' You know, that's where it's at." At the very last minute, with
the threat of danger from his creditors hanging over him, the lieutenant
forgives the rapists, gives them his gambling money and sends them on a
bus out of New York City. It goes against everything in his nature (he shares
a vial of crack with the zonked perpetrators and slaps them while forgiving
them--at gunpoint). But despite the presence of Christ and the fine theological
point being made, Bad Lieutenant seems more a film about the state
of urban America than an expression of Catholic guilt or religious feeling:
while everyone screams about putting more cops on the streets and stepping
up something called the drug war, the final, simple answer is forgiveness.
But forgiveness is hard to come by, and seems possible only under extraordinary
circumstances. Arguably this is a realistic portrayal of redemption, but
that redemption doesn't bring any peace to the lieutenant, who not long
after dies a lonely death in his car in front of Madison Square Garden.
It's all done in one long shot, one of the greatest endings I've seen in
a movie, modern or otherwise. Keitel sits in his car while midtown traffic
goes by. After awhile, a car pulls up next to him. "Hey, cop!"
we hear a voice call, then two pops from a gun and the car speeds off. The
dulcet "Pledging My Love" by Johnny Ace mingles with the street
noise. Nothing happens for a time until one woman notices, and then a small
crowd gathers around the lieutenant's car. The noise doesn't stop and the
traffic keeps going: a huge truck and then a city bus with a cheesy advertisement
on its side pass slowly before the camera, obscuring our vision of the car.
They pass, revealing the car, the crowd, and a cloudy day hanging over midtown
Manhattan. Is this a transcendant expression of spiritual immanence or an
insistence on materialist reality? And is it a carefully thought out formal
maneuver or an expedient one-shot money saver in a film budgeted at around
a million dollars? It is finally none of these things. It is a delving into
a galvanic situation by a great realist of modern cinema. I've tossed the
word "reality" around alot in this admiring portrait, and during
this historical moment when it has come to seem such a nebulous term, it's
reasonable for the reader to expect a definition. As we're knee deep in
all manner of technological folderol in the movies (computer animation,
interactive game films, red raincoats in black and white films about the
holocaust and disappearing body parts in revisionist tracts about '60's
America), one definition that comes to mind is: evidence of a mind at work.
That's Abel Ferrara and his movies in spades. He's the man.
lingo 4
 Books in print by Kent Jones
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