'We Did it Before And We Can Do it Again'
-
Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Bad Lieutenant
asktheages — 11 years ago(July 16, 2014 09:57 PM)
A brilliant edit, and a brilliant, darkly comic scene cutting from the shocking and nightmarish nun's rape to a kitsch children's cartoon, an army of mice chirping fascist platitudes while LT. irritably awakes from his drugged stupor/sleep. Meanwhile, his clueless little daughter (doubled with the Korean store owner's daughter from three scenes back, in a film full of doubles and mirroring) stares blankly, taking it all in. Interestingly, the quoted song was originally written as a US propaganda piece during WWII.
"Your mental capacity isn't the only problem. You also have the sensibility of a cow on morphine." -
kmags84 — 9 years ago(June 25, 2016 01:12 AM)
I don't doubt that the song plays on that level. With AF and Zoe, they are/were very Liberal People but also against any interference from Authority. Maybe Liberterian would be a better description
Anyway, back to the song. Other than what you mentioned and I'm saying this from experience as a former Addict, the scene rings all too true. I've been passed out, had my niece and nephew at my side, waking me up, basically wanting to spend time with their Me And I shunned them. Whatever cartoon they watch, irritating the beep outta me. Withdrawal kicking in, not wanting to move. I mean, we should be enjoying these moments, yet, it's all just noise. It's agitation at its worst but creates nothing but Guilt. -
asktheages — 9 years ago(July 11, 2016 12:30 AM)
Given some of Abel's comments in recent years, I doubt he'd call himself a libertarian. With Zoe, who knows If only in the drug war area, maybe she wrote a passionate, searing editorial to the NYT in the early 90s about negative attitudes about needle-exchange programs and addicts in general:
http://zoelund.com/docs/NeedlesOpEd.html
There's a video online where Abel and DP Ken Kelsch are discussing the film as it plays (different from the audio commentary on the DVD which also features those two), and at this scene's reveal of the LT's living conditions they laugh, with Abel saying something about how it hits too close to home with how he used to live. I never did have that kind of interaction with children or extended family while in active addiction but I do know that state Keitel's in is all too real. Irritation and complete disinterest in anything but the drug(s) of choice (or gambling, as LT. watches the game raptly). It's perfectly appropriate that we never really meet or know his family, and only barely glimpse them, because this is exactly how he sees them peripheral, not exciting unless they can get help him get coke or dope or vodka faster. In general, I find Abel's films to be the most incisive and true-to-life about addiction: besides this one,
The Blackout
is (to put it crudely) like a version of Bad Lt. with a movie star instead of a cop, Matthew Modine is amazing in that; also,
The Addiction
may be Ferrara's ultimate word on the subject, intense and unrelenting.
'R Xmas
doesn't really show much of any drug use, instead giving us an incredibly realistic, The Wire-meets-Bresson kind of methodical picture of the early 90s heroin trade in NYC, Ferrara treating us to countless shots of the heroin being perfectly measured and packed into stamp bags which are then labelled and sealed and distributed, etc
Of course Zoe was an addict (you can read her heavily romanticized, though intriguing and poetic, musings on heroin on various sites), and Abel was too from pretty much his 20s until (to my knowledge) around 2011-2012. He set the record straight in one 2012 interview with the recovery site The Fix, saying he'd recently kicked a substance with the help of Suboxone; shortly after in 2013, he went on an incredibly honest rant in another interview in which he revealed that his 2011 film
4:44: Last Day on Earth
often seen as a "sober film" for Abel, where Dafoe's character is an ex-addict who chooses sobriety and love over one last pre-apocalypse shot was in fact directed while he was strung out on H. I'm just gonna quote his response and leave you with that because it's quite fascinating and brings things full circle, a little:
RUILOVA: Let's talk a little more about Bad Lieutenant?
FERRARA: "Here's the deal. We were talking about a movie I made 20 years ago. I don't give a beep about Bad Lieutenant. For me, that's yesterday's news. There isn't some big board out there grading all of our movies. They're only movies. Movies are only the result of where we are as human beings, you know what I mean? I just did an intense amount of interviews for 4:44, right? With the most intellectual, thematic beep you've ever met in your life, who know every film that's ever been madeincluding all of my films. We can talk about Driller Killer, but I was making films for 10 years before I even made Driller Killer. I've been making films since I was 16 years old, man. Finally, I had to say to these guys, "Okay, let's start from scratch." Are we going to talk about the guy who wrote 4:44, which I was five years ago, or the guy in partial recovery who had quit drinking and was going to AA meetings but still doing heroin? That's the guy who directed it. They were saying 4:44 was from my sobriety, but no, I wasn't sober at all. I was high as a beep kite when I directed that movie, okay? So all the beep that you now assume that this is the new straight Abel, I was just as beep up as I ever was. Does that change the film? Absolutely not. So which guy do you want to talk about? You want to talk about Bad Lieutenant? I don't even remember Bad Lieutenant, so that's where Bad Lieutenant's at. But say you just saw The Addiction the night before . . . That's the great thing about moviesThe Addiction becomes a brand-new movie for you. You just experienced it. Lili Taylor is a 27-year-old, dynamic young actress. Do you dig? Nicky St. John [writer of The Addiction], who I haven't seen in 15 years, wrote his greatest script the day his son died. That's what we're leading to. But that was like a hundred years ago for me."
http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/abel-ferrara