Dennis hopper and Matthew Modine in The Blackout.
“How Can We Bear It?” In the private sphere as depicted by Ferrara, all ordinary human activities are related in ecstatic terms. People do not embrace, they rape (from 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy and Ms .45 to Dangerous Game and The Funeral); they do not sleep, they black out (Reno in The Driller Killer, L. T. in Bad Lieutenant, Matty in The Blackout); they do not dream, they murder (Matt in Fear City, L. T., Matty); they do not work, they kill (Reno, the families in China Girl and The Funeral, Matty), or they deal drugs (the family in ’R Xmas), or both (Jimmy Jump in King of New York). Take, for example, the act of eating. Generally, Ferrara’s characters prefer to drink, but when they do eat, it is in the mode of demented piggery (the pizza scene in The Driller Killer), cannibal orgy (The Addiction), or hallucinogenic pill popping (The Blackout). There are a few scenes of domestic meals, but in the breakfasts of Bad Lieutenant and Body Snatchers no one really eats, and these family reunions serve only to nourish conflicts. When the dinner scene is calm, as in ’R Xmas, it focuses on a sweet little girl and her nice grandmother; but right behind them is the sight of the girl’s parents calmly preparing to go to work drug dealing in a parking lot. The only legitimate, smooth, functional meals are those enjoyed by lawmakers—except that crime is the law, and so the meal is always a means of settling accounts (the Mafia-Triad dinner in China Girl, Matt and the Mafia godfather in Fear City, Eddie and Sarah’s adulterous dinner in Dangerous Game). When normality asserts itself, it is the object of a systematic enterprise of execration: the affectionate meal that opens Dangerous Game represents the image of peace that the entire film sets out to destroy.
In the sphere of inner life, psychic processes are treated as a vertigo, manifested in the characters’ permanent inebriation. But this drunkenness does not signify negative behavior. It is the sign of a privileged relation to truth—not self-destruction but a euphoric homage to life’s vitality. The moment in The Blackout when Matty deliberately falls off the wagon is first a rational act (booze serves as the analytical instrument to help re-find an image), then an act of joy (Matty dances and exalts, a party for his spirit).
All this torment—the tortured souls, the twisted-up bodies in agony on the floor—comes from the dolorous distinction between knowledge and acknowledgment, which completely determines Ferrara’s image-economy. Knowledge involves a vital, immediate relation to the real (and thus to evil); acknowledgment involves the way in which consciousness admits this relation or not. It is exactly the question posed by the artist Christian Boltanski in the title of a thirty-second film he made in 1970, How Can We Bear It? Ferrara’s protagonists each serve to demonstrate a particular conflict between knowledge and acknowledgment.
Trauma and Acknowledgment A particularly clear trilogy on figures of consciousness threads its way through Ferrara’s career: Bad Lieutenant, The Addiction, and The Blackout. The central characters of these films incarnate three complementary relations to reality, and thus to psychic activity. For each of them, reality amounts to anguish, and agreeing to encounter reality means trauma. The way in which each character lives this trauma determines which figure of consciousness they embody.
L. T. in Bad Lieutenant is (as we have seen) the figure of denial: the world does not exist, nothing can touch him. When the news is bad he shoots the radio; there is nothing to see or comprehend. He denies exteriority, otherness, and death, de-realizing everything he encounters (even a corpse is an erotic object to him). Kathy in The Addiction is the exact opposite, a figure of introjection: not only does she encounter the exterior, she invites it, absorbs it, and lets herself be devoured by it. She is completely permeated and destroyed by the real, somatizing torment to the point of death. Matty in The Blackout represents the figure of loss: he does not know what he has experienced, yet he lives in a state of continual trauma that prolongs itself in multiple replays. This third mode of response, apparently local—it no longer concerns evil in general, only the specific event of a murder—nonetheless constitutes the psychic synthesis of the two preceding modes. Like L. T., Matty is blind (blacked out); like Kathy, he relives the agony in a sharp, repetitive way. In all three cases, the foreclosed real returns in the form of an image. From this angle, the films offer a rigorous survey on the diverse natures and forms of the image.
L. T.’s images are mental, de-realizing concrete phenomena. Images return in their most incontestable form: the ultra-realist, hallucinatory apparition of Christ in the church, which leads to immediate, concrete consequences (L. T. learns the identity of the rapists). For Kathy, the real presents itself in the form of documentary images (Vietnam slides, Holocaust photographs, a television report on a Serbian massacre), prompting a process of appropriation that becomes progressively clearer. Kathy looks passively at the Vietnam slides, receiving the shock as any average spectator would. Then, in the context of the photographic exhibition on the Nazi camps, she strolls among the images as if in a world apart, inside her own consciousness as expressed in her voiceover comments. Finally, at home, Kathy gazes at the television item about a contemporary massacre, and the images form the shot whose reverse-shot is her sudden appearance as its allegorical cause—as indicated by the trail of blood that flows from her dark mouth. In a sequence-shot, Kathy then goes into the bathroom where her victim, doubly framed by door and mirror, is depicted, within the vampiric fable, as the incarnation of the television images. Here, too, Matty in The Blackout represents a synthesis. The memory of the buried event returns first as multiple mental images (which prove only approximate), and then as video images whose indisputable status hardly halts the delirium.
Faced with the obligation to stare at the intolerable, how does consciousness function? On this point the trilogy presents three eminently classical forms of the return to oneself, a crucial process in the constitution of subjectivity. L. T. undergoes a conversion. In the scene of Christian hallucination, he finally sees the God who has always been there but he did not want to see. He reproaches Christ, “Where the fuck were you?” or as Lund wrote in the script in relation to this divine apparition, “L. T. is not shocked or even surprised. He speaks to Jesus as to someone he’s known all his life.”73 Bad Lieutenant develops the profane version of the Augustinian formula—that God is more intimate to me than myself (“deeper than my inmost understanding”)—which inaugurated western subjective intimacy under the sign of inner confusion.74 Traces of divine presence are evident everywhere in the film. They are even more convincing when they are daily and widespread: the religious embroidery on the sofa and the money box in the home of Mamacita (Iraida Polanco); the cruciform arms of L. T. drunk or poised between two hoods; and also L. T.’s paranoia, which obliges him to verify if anyone is nearby, at Zoë’s pad or even in the most anonymous stairwell.
It should be noted that L. T.’s sacrificial trajectory has no aura of otherworldiness; on the contrary, it is shown to be anchored in the everyday life of a moving, populist, Latin American faith. This recurs as a motif in ’R Xmas in the beaded curtain representing the Virgin in the family home. Lund’s original script for Bad Lieutenant violently differentiates faith (sacrificial devotion) from institutionalized religion, which exploits kindness and love as commerce. The Pascalian principle of the wager suddenly takes on an extremely anticlerical dimension: “The fucking Church is the biggest scam going. You know what’s the real killer? It costs $8,000 per kid for them to go to parochial school. I’ve got three kids in there already, with two on the way! Christ. That fucking reward is my money, man! But that’s Church policy. The Pope is the world’s biggest bookie. Makes people bet on their own salvation! Double or nothing on Heaven.”75
Kathy in The Addiction represents a figure of repentance. Her spiritual experience consists not of conversion but atonement. Without hope, she swallows everything that is irreparable and expiates the collective evil. Like L. T., Kathy longs to be touched by grace; however, after Casanova’s final discourse and her own posthumous discourse, all trust in human faculties disappears; only hardship persists. Matty in The Blackout is a figure of reflexivity. The return to the self does not constitute the person who initiates it; in this case, it destitutes and destroys him, all the way to suicide. In this film, which is full of modern iconography, there suddenly emerges a biblical topos: the desert crossing. At the end of the research-by-hallucination scenes, a superimposition appears: we see Matty walking, mobile phone in hand, completely lost on a pale, white beach in Miami—wandering in the desert of abandonment and fear.
To Suffer and Delight from Knowledge After the aspects of trauma and psychic work, a third element participates in this mental apparatus: the interlocutor. Distinct from the traditional division between opponent and adjuvant, the interlocutor always proves to be, for the protagonist, at once antagonist, master, and accomplice. For L. T. in Bad Lieutenant, Large (the chief bookmaker who is never seen in the film) proves to be an accomplice, since he places the bets, and an antagonist because he ends up killing the gambler. But, above all, Large constitutes one of the most fascinating instances of the divine offered in contemporary cinema. His name recalls the theological attributes of God: Large is uncircumscribable, unrepresentable, invisible, ceaselessly sending his representatives (the bookie friend who warns of danger, the nun, Christ) to L. T. God is an inflexible old black bookie; L. T. forgives, but Large takes his revenge. We can glean a trace of Large’s passage in the close-up of the black face that bends down to L. T. in the church. The massiveness of this figure, in the way it is rendered, does not match the body of the old woman who departs in the following shot. The editing constructs a Trinity: the Sulpician Christ (the Son), the improbable Large (the Father), and the old woman (the Holy Spirit) who holds a chalice, dresses in virginal blue, and denounces her neighbors.
Kathy in The Addiction has a confidante, Jean (Edie Falco), but she meets her true interlocutor in Peina, the vampire king. He is also an accomplice, since they belong to the same species of predator and hunt together; a master, because Kathy is his descendant; and an antagonist, since he devours her physically and annihilates her intellectually. Like Augustine’s God, Peina has always been there; he has existed forever and read everything (Baudelaire, Burroughs, Nietzsche). The allegory is clear: knowledge kills.
In The Blackout, the interlocutor for Matty is Mickey, the king of “vidiots.” Matty and Mickey are accomplices because they have fun together and indulge in every kind of drunkenness: they take drugs, drink, fuck, kill, and make films together. But, in contrast to Matty, Mickey masters bodies and images. In staging Annie 2’s murder, he provokes his involuntary actor’s suicide. Mickey behaves like a prophet, rarely departing from a register of declamation, shouting, and cursing. Like Large or Peina, he is the one who knows. He knows, for instance, how to live with death and guilt, as in his final commandment for Matty’s consideration: “Learn to live with it!” Mickey masters knowledge locally (he knows what happened, where to find Annie 1 alive and Annie 2 dead, where to find the right image) and universally, since he announces to all that the Age of the Image has come.
A long way from the traditional narrative motor, which opposes knowing to not knowing, the functional division of Ferraran couples plays on the relation to knowledge itself. The protagonist feels and suffers (he is crucified for what he knows); the interlocutor acknowledges and delights (he is jubilant in what he knows). The interlocutor represents not so much the one who causes pain, or even the one who recognizes its cause, as the one who has learned to live with suffering as if it were the very stuff of nature. Thus, despite all the evils they spread, despite all their stings and insults, Peina and Mickey do not appear as executioner figures. Their demented exaltation constitutes the refusal and energetic reversal of resignation within an ethical system where the true evil would be indifference.
The Two Destinies of Self-Consciousness: Dissolution and Devastation If, beyond this trilogy of Bad Lieutenant, The Addiction, and The Blackout, we reconsider Ferrara’s œuvre in its entirety, it becomes clear that self-consciousness has two possible destinies: a happy destiny (dissolution), and a catastrophic destiny (devastation). The happy trajectory occurs when consciousness reaches the level of the universal. It dies but, in a sense, goes on. L. T. in Bad Lieutenant, Frank in King of New York, and Kathy in The Addiction die in their effort to reclaim the world—they disappear into a universality that, on all three occasions, is signaled by being intermingled with the life of a Manhattan street.
In the original script of Bad Lieutenant, death occurs as an apogee, the perfect synchronization of two “hits”: the final hit of Darryl Strawberry’s bat in the decisive game of the baseball championship series, and the bullet fired by the unseen Large at L. T. The script ends on the doubled enigma of the wager: did L. T. bet judiciously, on Strawberry and on life? In the film, the eventual failure of Strawberry is no longer an issue, for victory has become solely a matter of morality: the nun’s forgiveness, L. T.’s confession, the revelation in the church, and finally the redemption of the rapists all establish a logic of the propagation of good that the protagonist’s dissolution in the crowd diffuses limitlessly.
Catastrophic destiny occurs when death does not signify a release from singularity, when self-consciousness turns in on itself and merges with a bad infinity—where lack spreads without limits. This destiny is treated in Ferrara’s three films about image-making protagonists: The Driller Killer, Dangerous Game, and The Blackout. These films constitute what I call the Artist Trilogy.
To Kill/To Create Images Ferrara’s films explore all possible variations on the relation between the acts of killing and creating images: comparison, metaphoric relation, cause-and-effect relation, homology—everything except simple opposition. The Driller Killer, Dangerous Game, and The Blackout invent, each in their own way, an apparatus that responds to the question, Can a film kill?76 These three films raise the image to a crucial intensity. They explore the powers of the image, as well as the links between mental images and concrete images (the image as a psychic complex or as a plastic object). This trilogy is about the links between singularity and destruction. To better grasp the way in which they articulate themselves, let us review a few basic points.
The three films feature four male protagonists: Reno the painter in The Driller Killer, Eddie the director in Dangerous Game, Matty the actor who creates mental images in The Blackout, and Mickey the video artist who creates plastic images in the same film. These four image-creators are all killers, whether open (Reno and Matty, murderers depicted by the films as victims) or secret (Mickey and Eddie, who do not themselves kill but are truly responsible, respectively staging the criminal gestures of Matty and Frank within Mother of Mirrors). Note that Ferrara’s female killers—Thana (Ms .45), Kathy (The Addiction), and Sandii (New Rose Hotel)—are not image-creators.
The three films are organized, in narrative terms, on the basis of sexual triangles: in The Driller Killer’s loft, a man and two women (Reno, Carol, and Pamela [Baybi Day]) together live out creative experiences (pictorial and musical) and sexual experiences (complete freedom, with no fixed couple), testing the limits of money and life itself (Reno prepares to disembowel Carol: end of film). Dangerous Game interweaves two triangles: a man (Eddie) goes back and forth between two women (his wife and his actress); a woman (Sarah) goes back and forth between two men (her director and her leading man). The Blackout complicates the situation: a man encounters three women (Annie 1, Susan, and Annie 2), but Annie 2 incarnates the degraded double of Annie 1—and even initially appears dubbed with Annie 1’s voice.
In all three films the image-creator lives out a solitary, unshareable experience in the midst of a close-knit group: Reno’s apartment is a little Warholian Factory housing two artist colonies, neither of which distinguishes work from life or private from public; the painter tribe and the muso tribe intermingle, create with or despite each other. In Dangerous Game the underground tribe is transformed into a professional team; the affective relations are much more intense there than in the family unit, the model that is being slowly vampirized. In The Blackout, the apparatus of confusion between creation and ordinary existence is stretched to its utmost, as anyone who enters Mickey’s studio instantly becomes an actor.
The three films proceed via conflicts between rival artists: opposition between Reno the painter and Tony Coca-Cola (Rhodney Montreal, a.k.a. the producer Douglas Metrov) the musician, which resolves itself when Tony shows up to be transformed into an image by Reno (he asks for a portrait to be painted on the spot). In Dangerous Game, as with its sexual triangles, the opposition is doubled, occurring between the director and his actors as well as between the actors themselves—but all this competition serves to create an emotional atmosphere that will enhance the project.
In The Blackout, the superficial opposition between actor and video artist (one stages the other: that is their professional relation and their “contract,” even once the manipulation has been transposed to the stage of real life) is doubled by a deeper rivalry between video artist and psychiatrist. The video artist Mickey directs Matty within a logic that confuses and hides images, whereas the psychiatrist, who also literally directs Matty, since he records all his statements, seeks to discern and re-find images. But this rivalry is not a strict, territorial division (a bad-versus-good image-economy). It intensifies itself in a spiral of exchanges and transferences signalled by a particular phenomenon: the film’s co-scriptwriter, Christ Zois, plays the psychiatrist (we see him only from the back in close-up, just as Moses on Mount Sinai saw God only from the back), while his son Elia plays one of Mickey’s cameramen. The psychiatrist’s office is in fact decorated with a poster of Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963). As Mickey yells his vibrant celebration of video recording (“truth twenty-five times a second”), he re-creates in his fanciful way the professional accolade that Christ L. Zois and Margaret Scarpa profess with regard to Zois’s pioneering use of video within a psychotherapeutic context: “The video camera has done for psychotherapy what the electron microscope has done for biology. It has brought therapy into the modern world.”77
On the level of structuring conflicts, the three films also vilify (with a certain glee) those who turn art into commerce: the obese, horny, and tasteless art dealer Briggs in The Driller Killer, who refuses Reno’s masterpiece and mentally crucifies the artist, is himself physically crucified on the studio door. At the antipodes to this we find Susan in The Blackout, pretty, blonde, and healthy—not to mention a seller of hyper-figurative paintings—encouraging Matty to sell himself to television (for seventy-five thousand dollars a week), which soothes the bad vibes the protagonist harbors on this point. As for the agents and producers of Mother of Mirrors (in Dangerous Game), their principal scenes were cut (practical scenes of preproduction and casting), but they appear almost entirely as Judas figures, since they encourage Eddie to betray and abandon his principal actor.
The three films develop the same idea of destruction as the supreme formal creation. All three invent a particular dialectic involving abstraction and figuration. The Driller Killer elaborates a convulsive equivalence between painting and killing, to the point of assimilating Reno’s murderous gesture with the film itself, thanks to the final red monochrome that (as we have seen) places the figures “underneath” the image. Dangerous Game constructs an equivalence between directing and killing, according to which acting consists neither of imitating nor inventing but reactivating a trauma; direction thus consists not of producing images but of destroying people. Mother of Mirrors cannot be completed; it ends in a white flash, the gunshot that the husband fires at his wife. We cannot be sure whether the male character liquidates the female character, the actor liquidates the actress, or the director liquidates his wife—but we can be sure that Dangerous Game liquidates Mother of Mirrors. The creation of images thus ends, once and for all, in this white flash that works to summarize everything in cinema that partakes of projection, in the material sense of a film projector with its flicker and lit-up screen, as well as the psychic sense of self-projection, narcissism, and blindness.
The Blackout constructs a triple equivalence between delight, the production of images (whether hallucinated or on video), and killing. The film ends on the pictorial superimposition of water and the phantom Matty/Annie 2 couple, rising up from blackness—evoking the sense that it is seeking something “beyond” the image, just as artists in the 1920s sought to paint the “last painting.” This is an image that would be narratively beyond death, symbolically beyond disappearance, and formally beyond the shot, placeless, without a subjective tie—the logical emanation of a lengthy elaboration of images that end up becoming autonomous. Ultimately, The Blackout can only find its ending in another dimension: sound (the song “One Fateful Day”). This “post-ultimate” image formally concludes a narrative trajectory during which nothing has been successfully created and where actions only verify failures: the child has been aborted, Nana Miami remains in the Limbo of perpetual recommencement, and the therapy, “looped” at the film’s start and end, concludes only with the patient’s suicide.
Œuvre and Infinity According to the Artist Trilogy, the work of art (the activity of images) involves simultaneously the production of objects (such as paintings) and a hallucinogenic flowering. Ferrara invents forms of visual translation between these two image-dimensions. The Driller Killer and Dangerous Game proceed essentially via a montage alternating between private and public spheres. The first part of The Blackout is devoted to the elaboration of superimpositions of the real and imaginary; its second part is organized as the vast analysis of a tragic superimposition staged by the video artist, that of Annie 2 upon Annie 1, where Matty must disentangle the two figures and re-find the real that has been covered over by fantasy. The work of art, thus thematized, is never merely a surplus, something that comes to be added to the real in order to embellish, illuminate, contradict, or contravene it. On the contrary, the work of art aspires to life’s vitality, destroys all that approaches it, and eventually destroys itself. The work of art proves to be a general devastation—not by deathly predilection but because the true work consists in letting infinity’s forms emerge.
According to ethical infinity, amour fou and the total communion of two subjects must never be renounced, even if one must die to avoid this mourning. Plastic infinity refers to the forms of the incomplete, which are organized into three principal modes: incompletion en abyme (films left as a collection of shots, like Mother of Mirrors and Nana Miami); sequences that are punctured, broken, in pieces (the suspended sequences in Dangerous Game, like that of the party suffused in red light where a drunken Sarah invents the “Privilege” tampon commercial; blacked-out shots; sharp caesuras, like the title “18 months later” in The Blackout; snatches of approximate images from Matty’s memory in the same film); and motifs swarming in broken multiplicities that dissolve their origin, appearing as nagging repetitions (for example, ceaselessly remaking the same scene in Nana Miami and Mother of Mirrors), proliferations of images incrusted in the frame, and confusions of figures. The organization of motifs evokes what is unstoppable and thus can only come to rest in an infinity of vibration. The exigency of infinity makes the work of art loop in nothingness, and this work annuls what it produces. What defines consciousness in these terms can be found at the heart of Hegelian negativity: “If we thought of consciousness as going beyond that [individuality as ‘special capacity, talent, character and so on’], and as wanting to give reality to a different content, then we should be thinking of it as a Nothing working towards Nothing.”78
However, the opposition between happy disappearance (the Consciousness Trilogy, which intensifies the relation to the intolerable and ends with the dissolution of consciousness in the universal) and dysphoric devastation (the Artist Trilogy, which explores the devastation of consciousness closed in on itself by its own “work”) remains a narrative opposition. Something more profound unites the totality of Ferrara’s descriptions of the psyche: a passage through delirium. How does delirium enter into a relation with infinity?
All of Ferrara’s films since 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy use psychic images as their primordial material. Most of the films contain fantasy sequences or treat real sequences as fantasies—such as the nun’s rape in Bad Lieutenant, simultaneously established within the fictional world and dreamt by L. T. Certain films are entirely constructed as phantasmatic translations of ordinary experiences (Bad Lieutenant, Body Snatchers, The Addiction); others explore the properties and nuances of different states of altered consciousness: recollection, premonition, the “flash,” dream, vision, trance, and impressions of déjà-vu. King of New York contains no images marked as unreal in this way, but its protagonist is the greatest visionary in Ferrara’s œuvre. His moral mission transforms the city into a fantastic universe where things glide in silence, such as his limousine cruising through the cemetery.
Local Delirium (Minor Mode) The direct treatment of psychic images in Ferrara’s films occurs in two regimes: local and total. During the 1980s Ferrara made three films founded on the same script principle of a hero completely transformed by a memory of death: Fear City, The Gladiator, and Cat Chaser. Detective Michael Torello (Dennis Farina) in Crime Story can also be cited: he instantly converts events experienced in the course of his investigation into nightmares or visions (such as the oneiric return of his murdered assistant in his office, which prompts a grief-stricken monologue that anticipates similar speeches in The Funeral).
In Fear City the division of the principal figure into two characters determines a strict distribution of interiority. Pazzo possesses no interiority. He is all athletic training, a murderous, glacial resolution, and implacable efficacy. His mind seems as empty as his loft, which lacks any furnishing beyond a mirror, whereas Matt is all troubles, memories, reminiscences, nostalgic returns to old loves (he falls in love again with his ex-lover Loretta), photographs pinned to the walls, haunting, and repetition. It is clear that what vanishes in this economy—the confrontation of an absence of interiority (Pazzo) with an overfull soul (Matt)—is the possibility of an equilibrious relation within the self. The film suffers from a structural problem in the sense that it manages to create only false conflicts: between the boxer and his ex-fiancée, who left him because she “loved him too much”; between the boxer and the law, since Detective Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams) only ever wants to help him; and between the boxer and the underworld, since the Mafia also wants to participate in the hunt for the serial killer who imperils their source of criminal revenue (the girls). The only real conflict resides within Matt himself: his guilt anxiety, even when carefully detached from its source (the death-drive is taken over by Pazzo), and the torment that takes him all the way to delirium.
Consider this sequential linkage. Pazzo decapitates yet another dancer with a sword, and the murder is announced to Matt. Instead of seeing flashes of the (elided) murder, Matt re-sees flashes of the boxing match years ago in which he killed an opponent. This transference-montage produces three symbolic results. First, Matt is effectively guilty of the murder (he detained Loretta, who had wanted to accompany her lesbian girlfriend, thus leading to the latter’s death and eliminating his female rival). Second, the only true opposition in the film is between he who controls his violence (the implacable functioning of the serial killer: an idea leads to a gesture leads to a death) and he who cannot control it (Matt’s complex, which propagates and transfers itself, connects and disconnects events). Third, there is no real solution offered by the film. Under the cover of an almost caricatural iconography of the happy ending (death of the serial killer, the lovers’ kiss dissolving into an aerial panorama of New York by night), it affirms the reign of madness and despair. The final street fight between Matt and Pazzo should logically constitute redemption for the professional fight: Matt should vanquish his own demons, and the heroic fight (against Pazzo) should compensate for the accidental murder (in the ring), thus halting the torment. Once he has technically won the fight against Pazzo, Matt hesitates for a moment and then decides to deliver the fatal blow, killing him. The appropriate mental and legal solution would have been to not kill his adversary this time, to halt the process of death; however Matt, after vacillating at the threshold of this logic, chooses to cut down Pazzo with one last blow, thus failing to resist the lure of violence. The film ends up saying two things at once: in killing Pazzo, Matt rids himself of the death-drive, but in deliberately reproducing the gesture of killing, the second murder remains a phantasmatic translation of the first—not an act of healing, but an aggravated heroic fantasy. Madness prevails, and the death-drive gains legitimate appearances (the cop hardly protests, the dancer succumbs to love). For the hero, access to normality in this world consists of killing his neighbor, who is himself.
Two years later, the telefilm The Gladiator takes up the same structure, changing only the lineup of heroes. Again, a protagonist is haunted by a traumatic event, and the principal figure is again split into two characters. Far from being a lazy reprise, however, this project offers an opportunity to interrogate the ending of Fear City by clarifying the question of violence. The stake of Fear City consisted of noting the irrepressible aggressivity of the individual; The Gladiator asks whether there is a difference between aggressive and defensive violence.
Here is how that question is dramatized: A serial killer murders his victims with a car (The Gladiator takes up the figurative principle of Steven Spielberg’s telefilm Duel [1971], in which the driver is seen only at the very end of the film and the true protagonist is his black car). Similarly, the true hero of The Gladiator is the morbid character of “car culture,” in opposition to the traditional American glorification of cars, motorcycles, and other individualistic machines. The serial killer murders the protagonist’s young brother. Crazy from sorrow and guilt, this hero, Rick Benton (Ken Wahl), decides to equip his van to hunt down the killer himself and, beyond that, to eliminate all hit-and-run drivers. Transformed into a highway lawman, he finds himself tagged by the media with a name: the Gladiator. For the public, however, this Gladiator is a confusing figure who represents at one moment an executioner and the next a lawman. Rick ends up behaving the same way as his antagonist, putting another person’s life in danger. He harpoons a car that is traveling too fast; in fact, the driver is taking his pregnant wife to the hospital. Rick also begins to realize that teenagers are acting up while claiming to be the Gladiator. Matt’s final gesture in Fear City is thus spread across the whole of The Gladiator: for someone to deliver justice, he or she must become confused with an executioner. The film constructs, step by step, an equivalence between attack violence and self-defense violence. The character of Rick allows us to reconsider the myth of the virile, highly equipped lawman: he is in fact a traumatized, depressive, uneducated man, incapable of sane reasoning. Like Matt and his boxing-ring memories, Rick is haunted by images of his brother’s murder. In both films, hallucination is rendered by very conventional means: slow-motion sound and visuals for the boxing-match death in Fear City; fragmentation, distorted image, and sonic echo for the brother’s murder in The Gladiator. In both cases the characters act in the grip of mental images that express the same logic of guilt and the same desire to take action. What marks the minor status of Fear City and The Gladiator in Ferrara’s output is less their simplistic structure than the purely functional role of these mental images.
Cat Chaser further simplifies the situation, since the traumatic memory explicitly serves as the film’s preamble. (This sequence does not appear in the director’s extended workprint.) We see a Marine, George Moran (Peter Weller), in the middle of an American invasion of the Dominican Republic. He is captured by a group of resistance fighters, one of whom, Luci Palma (Maria M. Ruperto), he shoots on a roof in the midst of an exchange of fire and faces likely death. This black-and-white, slow-motion preamble comes back much later in the film, when Moran returns to Santo Domingo to look for Luci, who spared his life. This time, the morbid memory no longer concerns the individual (Fear City) or the collectivity (The Gladiator) but history itself. Cat Chaser should have been a great film. Based on an Elmore Leonard novel, it dramatizes a question repressed by the entire American cinema: what happens in a country after an imperialist American war? Something of an equivalent to Cuba before Castro’s revolution, Santo Domingo has been invaded on every occasion since 1916 when a non-pro-American power had the possibility of installing itself there. The case here is the 1965 invasion of Santo Domingo—a sort of hideous “wrinkle” forgotten by history in the shadow of the Vietnam War. This event served to maintain the island in its colony status, home to every criminal traffic (weapons, drugs, and human flesh) that the Mafia—here represented by Andres De Boya (Tomas Milian), simultaneously a general, businessman, gang leader, domestic tyrant, torturer, and polymorphous pervert—enjoys under the American sun.
Haunted by his memory, Moran returns to Santo Domingo (peaceful at present, “not like Salvador or Nicaragua”), but instead of finding Luci, he once again encounters Mary (Kelly McGillis). She comes from the same city (Detroit) and the same milieu and furthermore is linked to him by a “guilty secret”—a rather obscure aspect of the story about which we learn nothing. Mary is married to De Boya, and their union clearly represents the criminal links that unite imperial America (Mary: rich, blonde, and white) and the central and South American dictators (De Boya: Mafioso, ugly, and sadistic). The polemical potential is strong and clear from the first occurrence of the traumatic memory. During the initial invasion of Santo Domingo—“making democracy safe for Gulf and Western,” as the voiceover ironically affirms—George is hit by a grenade. But as the film unfolds, the violence completely swerves away from the De Boya side, and Mary remains a victim-figure cleared of wrongdoing. The film superimposes diverse crimes in a rather suspect fashion. They are all worth roughly the same price, a “couple of million”: two million dollars is at once the price of the prenuptial agreement between Mary and De Boya, the price at which De Boya wishes to buy George’s Miami hotel, and the sum that De Boya keeps under his bed because it amounts to a year’s worth of living, or what he must keep in cash in case he needs to flee. The film’s only problem thus becomes how to free Mary without having her lose the proceedings from her marital contract—like an American enterprise implanted into a Third World country trying to recover the benefits of its exploitation while retaining its respectability.
This dubious conflict veers towards the parodic. To recover the money, George’s associates simulate a revolutionary assassination attempt against De Boya—liberation struggles serve only to mask conflicts between private interests. At the film’s end, the voiceover assures us that George is now fine because he has “just made the dream come true: he’s killed someone he didn’t know who was trying to kill him.” This healing remembrance declares its intimate character: Luci yells from a Santo Domingo balcony, “Cat chaser, cat chaser, I’ll show you some real bad pussy”—a sexual invitation that really means, “I’m going to kill you.” The elimination of this nightmare signifies that George, the white Detroit guy, can now sleep peacefully with Mary, the white Detroit girl. He is no longer afraid of her; the imperial war has served only as a metaphor for sexual anxiety. This is the true “guilty secret” that the film finds it impossible to admit: at no moment do the Dominican characters exist as anything other than repulsive figures, and the two white Americans cannot imagine their relations with colonial citizens as anything but exploitative, whether that means marrying them, killing them, or letting them die in their place (as occurs with Moran’s local adjuvants). In short, even before becoming lovers, the American heroes are complicit on every level. Returning to the colony consists of verifying “on the ground” what can still be plundered, recovered, or redirected. It would be hard to reduce the script’s possibilities in any more pitiful way; the polemical fiction promised by the nightmare prologue comes to be transformed into a sordid genre film, as if it were scared by its own critical potential. After Cat Chaser, Ferrara stopped using such simplistic tales about the liquidation of traumatic memories.
Total Delirium (Major Modes) What qualitative changes are evident between the three films founded on recollection (Fear City, The Gladiator, and Cat Chaser) and the work devoted to delirium? We pass from a conventional representation to a critical treatment of hallucination. In place of localized and cinematically overidentified memory-traces, hallucination becomes the object of a complete and integrated treatment. Reality and hallucination are presented in the same plastic and sonic terms; it is no longer the protagonist who becomes delirious but the film itself. Trauma no longer functions merely as a narrative cause or motor; it becomes a structuring principle.
In the memory films, the protagonist suffers; he seeks to reduce his suffering and reach the stage of healing (obvious, at least, in the case of Fear City). In the delirium films (The Driller Killer, Ms .45, Bad Lieutenant, Dangerous Game, The Addiction, The Blackout, and New Rose Hotel), trauma liberates an image-regime, and the point is not to reduce but to cultivate, propagate, refine, and understand it. In such a regime, the disappearance or death of the protagonist does not halt the outpouring of images.
This second logic no longer aims to liquidate itself (the miserable happy endings of Fear City, The Gladiator, and Cat Chaser, all showing a man in a woman’s arms) but, on the contrary, gets carried away: the figurative and plastic inventions transform the endings of the delirium films into codas that are often held in suspense, iterative, as if the film no longer wants to stop. In the memory films, there is a conventional access to a supposed state of normality; in the delirium films, there is a logical, unqualified use of image-pathologies, leading to the limits of understanding (enigmas, paradoxes, speculative spirals upon which the films suddenly “pull up,” in the way the sound of a heavenly song might pull up a sleepwalker on a cliff edge).
The Driller Killer offers, in visual terms, the passage from local to total delirium. The first murder committed by Reno comes after an outpouring of hallucinogenic images whose syntax and plastic qualities remain conventional: floating sounds, mysterious guests (the motifs painted on his canvases whisper his name), angled painting shots, allegorical hallucinations (Reno in a trance shaking his hair in slow motion before a blood-spattered background), and an allegory of hallucination (Carol with her eyes cut out). This hallucinatory sequence mixes premonition, reinterpretation, magnification of detail, phobic insistence, and displacement (Carol’s bloody eye sockets are associated with Reno painting the eyes of a bison), using the iconographic repertoire and syntactical resources most commonly associated with dreams. In this sequence, the link between creative torment (painting a canvas) and murder (drilling a tramp’s body) undergoes a lengthy visual elaboration.79 The rest of the film is devoted to economizing these transitions, directly joining creative act and criminal gesture, neither of which is connoted as more realist than the other. This leads to the formal fusion of both dimensions of experience in the final red monochrome.
Ms .45 takes off from a similar approach, treating reality and hallucination in the same plastic and sonic terms. Formally, however, we pass from distortion (the metamorphosis of the real is rendered explicitly) to translation (which the spectator must reconstitute). The film adopts this new structure with the greatest care—a compositional apprenticeship that will then authorize the unbelievable architectonic audacity of The Addiction, Dangerous Game, The Funeral, The Blackout, and New Rose Hotel. Consider the narrative premise of Ms .45, which offers a true script oddity: why, against all believability and any rule of narrative economy, is Thana raped twice in a row? Because the film’s opening is constructed as a chiasmus (defined in literary parlance as an inversion in the second of two parallel phrases of the order followed in the first). The studio workers undergo two harassments, from their paternalistic boss and then from the guys in the street. After a caesura provided by Thana’s journey home, the two ordinary acts of harassment are transposed into two extraordinary acts of aggression. The first rapist, lurking among the trash bins—played by Ferrara himself, still wearing under his mask Reno’s red make-up from the end of The Driller Killer—corresponds to the guys in the street; the second rapist, in the house, corresponds to the studio boss. In the street rape, the relation of phantasmatic translation is guaranteed by the urban context and by the fact that the rapist vows to return, a permanent menace. In the house rape, the relation of phantasmatic translation is guaranteed by the use of an iron that goes from the studio to the house via the context of the domestic economy (work/private property, underlined by the act of breaking into Thana’s window, which also signifies the violation of her hymen). The synthesis, the figurative knot, is tied via the trash-bag motif: the second aggressor, who first belongs to the domestic paradigm, ends up cut into pieces and thrown into random bins on the streets. Human flesh contained in a bag finds its everyday-reality referent when, at the supermarket, Thana gazes fascinated at the endless display of pieces of meat wrapped in plastic, enlarging this young girl’s sexual anxiety to the scale of a general body-phobia.
The strongest visual translation is not the connection from harassment to rape (and thus from the murders to a symbolic reparation) but the connection from the preparation for the murderous expeditions (Thana dresses, makes herself up, does her hair, and looks at herself) to the taming of her own body, the source of her self-reconciliation. The rape-revenge film as a genre is also a story of apprenticeship: a young girl learns how to surmount the anxiety of having a body and how to play with it to the point of pleasing herself with her own appearance. The totality of these connected events (ordinary experience and its extraordinary translations) establishes a general emotional translation between the usual irritation tolerated within social life and the strange rapture experienced by Thana (stupor, muteness, passivity, then an abrupt passage to action and a delirium of revenge). No element comes along to de-realize the scenes—apart from the horrific touch of the first rapist’s face swollen in a stocking—until the final extravagant return of the entire iconography of the fantastique during the Halloween ball (vampire disguises, giant spider webs, bats, zombies, brides), along with its most frequently used cinematic attributes (visual and aural slow-motion).
Ultimately, the structure of Ms .45 liberates delirious flashes (Thana re-sees the first rapist in her bathroom mirror, and at night she has dreams in which she hears her own voice as a child) that, tacked onto the overall composition in this fashion, escape the confines of the narrative anecdote. But the most violent phantasmatic transposition is also the most discreet: the burlesque treatment of Phil, the “husband” dog that lives with Thana’s neighbor, Mrs. Nasone (Editta Sherman). Thana is suspected of having killed this dog on the New York port. The dog represents the ideal companion for the ideal matron: he is always there, obeys all, says nothing, eats everything he is given (including human flesh), has his framed photo atop the piano, and represents no sexual threat. Thana can thus spare him, and that is why Phil returns in the film’s final shot, scratching at the door of his home. He justly deserves his second billing in the credits, right after Lund.
In Bad Lieutenant, L. T. wishes to see nothing, know nothing, and encounter nothing. As if to attest to their nature as figures of fantasy, his interlocutors always come in pairs. But that does not suffice. L. T. must also transform them into toys—the corpses in the car eroticized as dolls, his sex partners in the studio transformed into puppets, the misbehaving young women turned into porno actresses, and the rapists made into pals with whom he watches television and smokes crack. Everything is a vision to him: the nun’s rape is a dream; her pale, nude body in the hospital is a dazzling apparition; his betting decisions are revelations of certainty; and life is an endless blessing.
But how can there be a hallucination in this world that is already entirely hallucinated? By a hyperrealist eruption: the Christ who, as a statue, seems to cry in pain during the rape descends in flesh and blood from the cross (played by the Ferrara regular Paul Hipp) to meet L. T. The hallucinator and his hallucination dwell on the same plane, in an unexpected apparition-effect that will be reprised—in a minor, profane mode—with the sudden appearance of Susan in Miami during her telephone conversation with Matty in The Blackout. In L. T.’s de-realized universe, the event is characterized by a presence towards which he must crawl, that he must kiss, whose incontestable tactile nature he must verify. This encounter serves a triple function: conversion (the act of forgiveness); revelation (in a profane sense, the solution to the criminal investigation is provided); and denouement (in the psychic sense, he recognizes the existence of an alterity). In Bad Lieutenant, hallucination offers a resolution, and delirium explicitly passes to the side of knowledge—a postulate that will feed all of Ferrara’s subsequent films.
Led by the old woman (Minnie Gentry) dressed in a blue jacket, L. T. enters the dwelling of the two guilty parties, Paulo (Joseph Micheal Cruz) and Julio (Fernando Véléz). Here begins one of the film’s most incredible scenes. Instead of entering with precaution, menacing, arresting, and taking the crooks away as any other cop in any other American film would, L. T. penetrates into the dark lair of the rapists, sits down, and watches the baseball game on television with them on their couch. All the while threatening them with his gun, he shares a smoke from their crack pipe—almost as if it were a peace pipe. How is such a depiction, completely contrary to every convention, made possible?
The Trinity cannot be contemplated without a long preliminary spiritual trajectory. According to Augustine, for whom God’s trace is found within us like a haunting, we must cultivate “a mind more developed by exercise in these lower things” and work to “ascend as it were by steps.”80 Bad Lieutenant is structured upon such a movement (called anagogy within theological tradition): it proceeds via sliding, variation, and mutation between one figure and another, by means of copies, analogies, and inversions. This “curling” construction illuminates the film’s figurative economy. Two major trajectories are criss-crossed and interwoven. First, the “curl” of the boys:
—the two sons in the car
—the two young female corpses in the car
—the two young hoods in the Korean grocery store
—the two young rapists in the “black church”
—the two sons receiving their first Holy Communion in the “white church”
—the finding of the two rapists (who, according to the script, were to be dressed in cassocks stolen from the church, to emphasize the relation to the children’s communion scene)
—the two rapists in the car, forgiven and freed
Second, the “curl” of the little girl:
—L. T.’s little daughter
—the junkie Zoë (ex-Magdalene)
—the shattered Virgin Mary
—the raped nun
—the little daughter of the Korean grocer
Three consequences follow from this twin structure. The demented Trinity that L. T. ends up meeting face to face synthesizes both threads: two boys and a girl / two men (Son and Father) and a woman (the Virgin Mary as a compassionate black mother). The film is filled with transvestite figures: Bowtay the androgyne; Veronica (Lambert Moss) the informant; and the dancer who opens the scene of Paulo and Julio’s arrest, dressed in a red cassock that the thieves would have stolen and whose ambiguity the film maintains, desexed like a figure so eaten away by drugs that she has already returned to the skeleton stage. These three figures guarantee the connections between the sexes and transform normal couples into strange trios. They represent link-figures, rather like the Holy Spirit, a connection principle invented by patristic culture. Most importantly, tracing back the “curl” allows us to grasp its origin, its substratum. Bad Lieutenant turns out to be a paternal nightmare. L. T. lives out a nightmare in three ways: the hallucinogenic nightmare of seeing his two sons turn to evil; a surge of incestuous fantasies regarding his daughter; and an absolute hatred of his wife, almost entirely expelled from the frame and replaced, on the one hand, by his mother-in-law presented as a white-haired old witch (another unidentified woman in this extended family, Aunt Wendy, is blamed for making the sons late for school, thus triggering the general nightmare) and, on the other hand, by the illegitimate couple Ariane and Bowtay. The parallel between the execrated wife and Ariane (Robin Burrows) appears more clearly in the script: of the wife, there remains only a pile of bills to be paid, while Ariane never stops demanding rent money. Even if L. T., in contrast to an ordinary junkie, has no need to perpetually look for money to buy drugs, since he has an inexhaustible “professional” stash (given to him by the dealers, not the other way around), nonetheless the fantasies of the bet and the reward serve as compensatory financial dreams to ease the perpetual conjugal demands for money.
What will become of my children, what can I do for them, and how do I provide for their needs? The film transposes these ordinary agonies of a father into a criminal nightmare. Thus the meaning of the peace-pipe scene becomes clear: it is a fantasy of perfect familial happiness, a Dad looking at a televised baseball game in the company of his two kids. But in Ferrara, to authorize the figurability of such a happy daydream, it must be the case that the father is drugged, the sons are delinquents, the home is a hovel, and the situation is illegal. What is the psychic benefit of this transposition? It allows a dream of forgiveness and freedom: in passing from the bourgeois world of the police to the Spanish Harlem underground, woman becomes a solution and no longer a problem. The future delinquents leave freely with their father’s heritage, and this Dad can die peacefully in his car—his only true home. For once, the impoverished world shelters everything that is positive, while the bourgeois world possesses only what is negative. Thus, “the detective finds the secret hidden among men,”81 the secret of impossible happiness, the promise of which is forbidden us by the violence of the material universe. The film’s energy thus arises from the conspicuous nature of its anagogical structure, the clear, simple progression that proceeds by similitude or contrast from one figure to the next. Its elegance is born from what is not explicit in its underpinning (the familial horror), while it concentrates upon the linking and relating of its figures. To put it another way, far from those films that are content to illustrate an explicit situation with more or less original incidents, Bad Lieutenant works upon the slow translation of an affect of agony within the form of an image-story. This is why the film is significant: it considers the image not only as a plastic entity but above all as a spiritual exercise. Such a formal proposition largely surpasses the Christian anthropology in which it is anchored.
The Addiction uses exactly the same structure as Ms .45. The film’s opening gives us a reality check: Kathy’s discovery of historic horror as she views the slides of the Vietnam War. This intellectual shock is later transposed into a physical shock thanks to a caesura depicted by an extended moment of blackness and a lateral tracking shot—brilliantly comparing the passage between the real and its translation with a slide change on the screen. The film proposes, on the basis of this structure, several developments in relation to the analysis of images. Take, for example, the sequence covering Kathy’s visit to an exhibition on the Nazi death camps and her experience of its affective consequences—an ensemble of three scenes physically linked by the same passage of the musical score. In scene 1, the photographic images are already present, huge, attached to transparent glass that covers the border between the museum and the street. Kathy moves from one display to the next in a dreamlike space that is simultaneously interior and exterior. This space opens out further due to the soundtrack, which juxtaposes and links a prayer, a Nazi speech, and Kathy’s voiceover meditation; this soundtrack confronts past and present, cause and effect, historic catastrophe and the psychic attempts to understand it. These attempts prove to be of two orders, at antipodes to each other, and both set against the Nazi speech, on either side of it: the ritual prayer pacifies, while Kathy’s meditation inflames.
Here we see—or rather, hear—exactly what Ferrara’s enterprise consists of. Empathy with suffering does not pretend to console; reflection does not liquidate the traumatic event but, on the contrary, sharpens it and lets it vibrate. The exhibited images do not represent tiny gaps in the world; they are the world. Their photographic fixity reinforces this effect of presence sub specie aeternitatis. The traumatic image becomes a subject, and the creature who strolls about and receives it constitutes the object. In Nicholas St. John’s original script, the walk is purely pedagogical, like the slide sequence. Kathy goes to the Holocaust Museum, her friend Jean takes notes, and both of them, overwhelmed and unable to bear the images, flee: “I can’t look at this … I’m going.”82
The film negotiates in a completely different way this reaction to what is intolerable. Kathy not only withstands the vision, she somatizes and propagates it. In scene 2 of the sequence, her terror transcribes itself immediately in vampiric terms: she leaves the exhibition and finds a bum asleep on the street. Using a syringe, she withdraws blood from his arm; the scene reworks the plastic characteristics of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942)—a palette of extreme deep blacks, and a cat shadow on a brick wall. In scene 3, Kathy goes home and injects herself with blood from the syringe. In flashes, we see a memory of Casanova, a home-movie image from Kathy’s childhood, and a little girl coming towards us like Kim Phuc, the famous girl of Trang Bang running along a road, seared by napalm. Instead of turning away from such terrifying images, Kathy introjects them and then observes the extent to which they contaminate her innocent memories. Can a child, ignorant of evil, be considered innocent? Or was she already, without realizing it, this vampire who spreads suffering, an all-American kid profiting from the benefits of an imperialist civilization? Evil is literally an epidemic, ignorance constitutes its best vector, and reflection offers absolutely no protection—quite the contrary. The Addiction represents the cinematic version of a proposition concerning the Holocaust formulated by Primo Levi:
[W]e felt that … now nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out our past, and that the scars of the outrage would remain with us forever. … Because, and this is the awful privilege of our generation and of my people, no one better than us has ever been able to grasp the incurable nature of the offence, that spreads like a contagion. It is foolish to think that human justice can eradicate it. It is an inexhaustible fount of evil; it breaks the body and the spirit of the submerged, it stifles them and renders them abject; it returns as ignominy upon the oppressors, it perpetuates itself as hatred among the survivors, and swarms around in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as a moral capitulation, as denial, as weariness, as renunciation.83
In The Addiction the range of image-apparitions is heteromorphous by nature (covering photography, cinema, visual exhibits, optical flashes, and so on) and wielded, on the formal level, with enormous freedom. But their relations of translation and (even more dynamically) contamination are extremely complex. The film invents a critical circulation of images—tearing those images away from the univocality of memory in an attempt to radically manifest their current, active nature (dramatized in terms of their harmfulness). In this economy the image no longer represents a prop but an agent, no longer a reflection but a cause—and it is impossible to be cured of it. On this level, the film has nothing to do with those overweening memorial spectacles that, in the United States, characterize the mainstream depiction of history’s genocides, in the vein of Holocaust (1978), Schindler’s List (1993), or the many Hollywood films about the Vietnam War that are devised to regain symbolically what was lost militarily. Rather, The Addiction belongs to the tradition of avant-garde films that work not to embalm the dead but to resuscitate images—by, for instance, inscribing pain and heartbreak onto the celluloid itself, as was practiced in relation to Vietnam by Carolee Schneemann in Viet-Flakes (1965), by Michèle Ray in her episode of Far from Vietnam (1967), and by Santiago Alvarez in 79 Springs (1969). Such works are the opposite of those films that reproduce the external signs of a catastrophe, known as “historical re-creation” or, in Nietzsche’s terms, antiquarian history. These artists invent films in the form of psychic processes, where it is not a matter of re-creating history (to an obscene point, in the case of the death camps) but looking for speculative logics by which we can grasp its horror. The Addiction transforms dread into a critical instrument for the analysis of history: “Only he who is oppressed by a present need, and who wants to throw off this burden at any cost, has need of critical history, that is to say, a history that judges and condemns.”84
We have already seen how, in Dangerous Game, the different images (movie shots, video rushes, the film en abyme) partake of a structural confusion that emphasizes their nature as mental phenomena. There exists another instance of delirium in the film, an organic model of aesthetic construction: the delirium of the actor who separates herself from herself in a segment that can be called the “Privilege” scene. During the Mother of Mirrors shoot, Sarah is really raped by her acting partner because he is incapable of pretending—and because he wants to humiliate her. A little later, in a red-lit ambiance, Sarah in close-up, surrounded by pals and extras, improvises a theory of the actor’s performance in which expressivity (as she says) is a “heavy flow of bullshit” requiring a Privilege tampon (the scene does not exist in the script). While the previous instances of delirium had to abandon their conventional stylistic attributes (chromatism, play on speeds, and so on), here these attributes reappear, transfigured in a sensual apotheosis. While the other forms of delirium are integrated within a structure via visual transference, here the delirium connects to nothing, neither time nor space nor fiction. The “Privilege” scene offers the reverse side of the total delirium invented by Ferrara: it is a euphoric scene in which verbal delirium dissolves anxiety in laughter, an unexpected parenthesis of healing at the heart of a film where destruction sweeps away everything.
In a pre-edit of Dangerous Game there was another scene of delirium, experienced this time by Eddie. Totally wasted from drugs and alcohol, but even more from fatigue and absolute investment in his film, Eddie crosses his bedroom at the Château Marmont, goes out onto the balcony, and, moaning and crying in the manner of L. T., straddles the guardrail and almost throws himself into the void. He sees Madlyn in the midst of this delirium, overexposed and floating in light; she reproaches him for his cruel and irresponsible lifestyle. Why did this scene—which was surely Keitel’s finest moment in the film—disappear from the final cut? Doubtless because his tears were too much like L. T.’s in Bad Lieutenant, not to mention Mr. White’s in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992). But, more than that, because Ferrara’s entire effort consists of not splitting up scenes of experience (the suicide attempt) and scenes of explanation (Madlyn’s indictment); these scenes must be superimposed and confused.
Eddie’s suicide attempt will reinvest itself differently in The Blackout, where Eddie divides into two characters, Matty the actor (somatized inebriation) and Mickey the video artist (controlled inebriation). And the cut Château Marmont scene also divides into two: Matty’s methodical trance on his hotel balcony and his final watery suicide to the accompaniment of his deserted wife’s tears. The Blackout reworks, completes, and intensifies all the figurative inventions hitherto explored by Ferrara by directly tackling inebriation as its subject.
Knowledge from Delirium The Blackout does not tell a story; it explores a psychic complex. The film takes every conceivable risk. As a veritable essay on the image, it adopts the outward signs of the most ostentatious frivolity (commercial stars, iconography of luxury, a banal interpersonal intrigue). As a spiritual odyssey like Ferrara’s other films, it abandons the glory of Christian imagery and places itself on a terrain not only profane but trivial. As an ode to affective fusion, it renounces the dark splendors of heroic virtue that preside over Ferrara’s preceding work and charges its protagonist with an unforgivable crime. On its release, the misunderstanding by critics was total. But The Blackout succeeds in its bold attempt to conjugate the genre film with the theoretical essay, inventing an alliance that weakens neither the accessibility of the former nor the exigency of the latter.
The film is about the work of the imaginary upon the real. To place itself at the height of such a subject, the film probes an experimental situation: what happens when there is an “image missing”? The film dramatizes this question on two planes: Mickey’s film Nana Miami lacks a shot, that of Nana being strangled; and Matty—who has been led to perform the strangulation scene despite himself—lacks a memory. Whether it is achieved or not, the image creates lack in every way; as soon as the filmmaker obtains his image, it instantly becomes a vertiginous absence for the actor. The Blackout dramatizes lack thanks to a precise pathology: the alcoholic amnesia (or alcohol amnestic) syndrome. Due no doubt to Christ Zois’s input, the film effortlessly displays a thorough medical knowledge of delirium. However, even more crucially, it articulates this understanding in relation to several different clinical, philosophical, and ethnographic forms and traditions.
Alcoholic amnesia is clinically described as a “syndrome of prominent and lasting reduction of memory span, including striking loss of recent memory, disordered time appreciation, and confabulation,” sometimes associated with alcoholic jealousy (or alcoholic paranoia), “chronic paranoid psychosis characterized by delusional jealousy.” Matty does not want to have a child and forces Annie to have an abortion because he imagines that she has slept with other men—thus triggering the death-fiction. Clinically, alcoholic amnesia “occurs in alcoholics as the sequel to an acute alcohol psychosis (especially delirium tremens).”85 In The Blackout, manifestations of delirium tremens suffuse not only the big crisis scenes but also the permanent behavior of the central couple, Matty and Mickey: anxiousness, psychomotor agitation, spatiotemporal disorientation, tactile, visual, and aural hallucinations, and language disorders. This last aspect is particularly revealing: the film’s language disorders take several forms, notably inner voices (Matty hears an absent Annie) and the use of foreign languages (the French-American pidgin used by Matty when he searches for Annie on the telephone) but also verbal automatism, mainly from Mickey. This video prophet expresses himself in a coprolalic mode (in systematically basic terms) and in an onomatomanic mode (repeating certain words in an obsessive fashion). The cursing litany with which he exits the film—“Out! Out! Out! Out! Get outta here, fuckin’ live with it, motherfucker!” compulsively continuing his rant after Matty has already left—brings all these symptoms to their zenith. In this respect, The Blackout fully exploits the verbal resources that are so emblematic of Dennis Hopper’s acting.86
Erotomania, jealousy, and constant demands, which characterize morbid states of passion, define the behavior of both Mickey and Matty.87 This affective ambiance, concentrated and intensified on the video artist’s set, introduces the specific work of hallucination into the economy of psychic images. Two types of hallucinatory crises in fact exist. Visual agnosia erases all images and corresponds thus to the blackout, which can further be associated to a raptus, a “violent and sudden impulse which can lead a delirious subject to commit a grave act (homicide, suicide, mutilation).”88 And hallucination, strictly speaking, also occurs in two regimes: positive hallucination, or the birth of an image by alteration of a referent; and negative hallucination, which consists of simultaneously acknowledging and repressing a traumatic perception. Such is the psychic adventure experienced by Matty: he knows that he has committed some act but is unsure exactly what, and this act ceaselessly returns in the form of nightmares of abortion and strangulation.
The emergence of a negative hallucination presupposes four stages. First, affirmation of the pleasure-principle, Matty’s modus vivendi and Mickey’s raison d’être: to ceaselessly enjoy oneself in a space entirely given over to such pleasure, a space that superimposes a work set, a spectacular party, and a permanent orgy. Second, eruption of an unbearable stimulus (the loss of Annie). Third, suspension of perception thanks to diverse means (in this case, alcohol, cocaine, crack, passing out). Fourth, scotomization: the simultaneity of knowledge and repression. Negative hallucination thus allows the intrapsychic representation of an object’s absence while it remains present in external reality.89
It is clear that, on this level, delirium allows an extremely organic exploration of the process of representation. The delirious person is a performer who grandly “works” images. Contrary to common-sense opinion, delirium constitutes neither a flight from the real nor an arbitrary fantasy. It testifies to an intensive relationship with knowledge. But it is the body that carries this testament. “A certainty ceaselessly unleashes in actions a massive bodily response, somnambulistic and unmediated.”90 We recognize, in this description of drug-addicted delirium, the figure of the vampire, like Peina and Kathy in The Addiction—creatures of the night and of knowledge—but also Frank in King of New York and L. T. in Bad Lieutenant, the characters of an always traumatic metamorphosis of knowledge within the body. Those who learn of or transmit the equivalence of truth with evil are the creatures of disillusion. The purest instance of this is Peina, the bearer of a cruel truth, and the most complex is Frank, to the extent that he maintains his mission despite disillusionment.
In the same way, Matty’s recourse to alcoholic delirium is represented as an analytical relation to knowledge, an instrument with which to reach the truth. He plans out his trip to Miami because his euphoric reunion with alcohol will allow him to find an explanation for his torment. “Delirium is an attempt at self-healing, the reconstruction and restoration of a world lost through object-withdrawal.”91 Such a definition of delirium as the solution to a psychic conflict explains a remarkable oddity of the script: why, in his mental expedition, does Matty not bother to bring along his own provisions of alcohol and drugs? To be efficient, the hallucinogens and associated props (alcohol, cocaine, bedsheets) must be found at the same place as the birth of the torment; if they do not belong to the scene of the crime, they cannot constitute convincing tracks to truth. Because the shots of alcohol that Matty finds in his hotel mini-bar resemble medicine vials, the return to drinking does not represent so much a “falling off the wagon” as an attempt at healing. And finally, the very small (the booze shot) is transformed into the very big (the pitcher), without passing through the normality of the bottle—thereby following the major model of the plunge-into-dream, namely, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
So if delirium is an instrument, what purpose does it serve? It is not enough to say that the delirious person is in search of a lost or absent object; he unconsciously intends to reconstitute or repair an object that in fantasy he feels he destroyed or damaged by aggressively incorporating it. The delirious person’s system represents a re-creation and a resurrection of the object.92 The Blackout puts this dynamic of re-creation into narrative form in various ways: Matty makes images return; Mickey, the “remake” specialist, re-creates Annie 1 from Annie 2; the film makes a living Annie 1 return right in the middle of Matty’s delirium; and it also makes Annie 2 and Matty—both dead—return in the final superimposition. Ultimately, the work of delirium stretches far beyond Matty and touches the film itself, which enters into a delirious process far more than its characters do.
There are two regimes of delirium: in acute or semi-acute forms, and in forms organized over a lengthy evolution. Matty incarnates the former regime, according to which “the subject, identified with the world, himself becomes a sort of swarming and unsettled scene, where the processes of introjection and projection succeed each other at a rapid rate.”93 The film organizes itself according to the latter regime, where delirium is no longer a crisis but a way of life. It functions on an alternating dynamic of engulfment and resurrection by means of visual and aural reprises and variations—in clinical terms, palinopsia. Delirium does not arise from alcohol or drugs (which are only accessories) but from the disorganization of functions of the self due to object-loss. On this level, the fantasies of abortion and murder are not meant as credible plot incidents but so many litanic realizations of a relation to the world as a relation of loss.
Certain more discreet traits enrich the trance dimension of delirium, considered within an ethnological perspective. Beginning with the Miami scene of unleashed hallucination, the deliberate, concerted aspect of this project resembles a rite of possession. There are two types of possession: exorcism (refused possession) and adorcism (cultivated, ritualized possession). Matty’s case clearly belongs to the latter type. As an actor, he is the “certified” possessed, a vehicle for the transmission of images; and then he truly “becomes” his work when he transforms himself into a medium, a building site for images. His enchanted reunion with alcohol adopts the traditional characteristics of a possession ritual: music, dance, entering into a trance, transformation into a medium, manifestations of the possessing entity (Mickey) with whom the medium can establish an alliance and who can demand that the person in crisis become his servant (a radical mode of the director/actor relation). Thus possession transforms this superficial star (his superficiality is indicated by the tiny, infantile vehicle on which he leaves the airport and a magazine photo showing him in the company of the top stars of the moment) into an But it is the body that carries this testament. “A certainty ceaselessly unleashes in actions a massive bodily response, somnambulistic and unmediated.” We recognize, in this description of drug-addicted delirium, the figure of the vampire, like Peina and Kathy in The Addiction—creatures of the night and of knowledge—but also Frank in King of New York and L. T. in Bad Lieutenant, the characters of an always traumatic metamorphosis of knowledge within the body. Those who learn of or transmit the equivalence of truth with evil are the creatures of disillusion. The purest instance of this is Peina, the bearer of a cruel truth, and the most complex is Frank, to the extent that he maintains his mission despite disillusionment.
In the same way, Matty’s recourse to alcoholic delirium is represented as an analytical relation to knowledge, an instrument with which to reach the truth. He plans out his trip to Miami because his euphoric reunion with alcohol will allow him to find an explanation for his torment. “Delirium is an attempt at self-healing, the reconstruction and restoration of a world lost through object-withdrawal.” Such a definition of delirium as the solution to a psychic conflict explains a remarkable oddity of the script: why, in his mental expedition, does Matty not bother to bring along his own provisions of alcohol and drugs? To be efficient, the hallucinogens and associated props (alcohol, cocaine, bedsheets) must be found at the same place as the birth of the torment; if they do not belong to the scene of the crime, they cannot constitute convincing tracks to truth. Because the shots of alcohol that Matty finds in his hotel mini-bar resemble medicine vials, the return to drinking does not represent so much a “falling off the wagon” as an attempt at healing. And finally, the very small (the booze shot) is transformed into the very big (the pitcher), without passing through the normality of the bottle—thereby following the major model of the plunge-into-dream, namely, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
So if delirium is an instrument, what purpose does it serve? It is not enough to say that the delirious person is in search of a lost or absent object; he unconsciously intends to reconstitute or repair an object that in fantasy he feels he destroyed or damaged by aggressively incorporating it. The delirious person’s system represents a re-creation and a resurrection of the object. The Blackout puts this dynamic of re-creation into narrative form in various ways: Matty makes images return; Mickey, the “remake” specialist, re-creates Annie 1 from Annie 2; the film makes a living Annie 1 return right in the middle of Matty’s delirium; and it also makes Annie 2 and Matty—both dead—return in the final superimposition. Ultimately, the work of delirium stretches far beyond Matty and touches the film itself, which enters into a delirious process far more than its characters do.
There are two regimes of delirium: in acute or semi-acute forms, and in forms organized over a lengthy evolution. Matty incarnates the former regime, according to which “the subject, identified with the world, himself becomes a sort of swarming and unsettled scene, where the processes of introjection and projection succeed each other at a rapid rate.” The film organizes itself according to the latter regime, where delirium is no longer a crisis but a way of life. It functions on an alternating dynamic of engulfment and resurrection by means of visual and aural reprises and variations—in clinical terms, palinopsia. Delirium does not arise from alcohol or drugs (which are only accessories) but from the disorganization of functions of the self due to object-loss. On this level, the fantasies of abortion and murder are not meant as credible plot incidents but so many litanic realizations of a relation to the world as a relation of loss.
Certain more discreet traits enrich the trance dimension of delirium, considered within an ethnological perspective. Beginning with the Miami scene of unleashed hallucination, the deliberate, concerted aspect of this project resembles a rite of possession. There are two types of possession: exorcism (refused possession) and adorcism (cultivated, ritualized possession). Matty’s case clearly belongs to the latter type. As an actor, he is the “certified” possessed, a vehicle for the transmission of images; and then he truly “becomes” his work when he transforms himself into a medium, a building site for images. His enchanted reunion with alcohol adopts the traditional characteristics of a possession ritual: music, dance, entering into a trance, transformation into a medium, manifestations of the possessing entity (Mickey) with whom the medium can establish an alliance and who can demand that the person in crisis become his servant (a radical mode of the director/actor relation). Thus possession transforms this superficial star (his superficiality is indicated by the tiny, infantile vehicle on which he leaves the airport and a magazine photo showing him in the company of the top stars of the moment) into an actor who rediscovers, in a profane mode, the nobility of his profession by returning to the ritual sources of his work.
Figurative Logic: Forms of Illusion and Dementia The Blackout methodically explores the difference between knowledge and acknowledgment. Matty knows that he has committed an error but has no idea what it is; he must convert this immediate intuition into objective knowledge. The film takes on the task of converting the (affective) crime into a (physical) murder. When Mickey visits his studio for the first time, an argument unfolds on one of the video screens between two assistants (Nancy Ferrara and Steve Bauer, the guy who earlier parodied the reunion kiss between husband and wife, a kiss visually transferred throughout the film via Bauer’s miming of a hand-cranked “zoom-in” on this gesture). During the later scene in which Matty returns to the studio to search for his vanished wife, we see a similar quarrel only “live,” experienced in the moment by Nancy Ferrara and another assistant. The scene goes on forever, just as the lack that joins the allegorical couple in the final image goes on forever. But that also signifies that no anteriority exists between the referent and copy, between the real and its recording. Does “the real” mean to live in the immediacy of things without being able to reflect on them (the blacked-out crime), or to know them without being able to admit them, thus losing the ability to live (the avowed murder, with suicide as its corollary)?
The Blackout responds clearly to this question: ordinary psychic experience organizes a permanent desynchronization between the event and its intellection. Ferrara’s cinema reproduces the phantomatic latencies, echoes, remanences, transferences, confusions, and illusions (hallucinations, fantasies, and approximations) that disalign us from the real and yet are our own life. Following the Ferraran logic of ecstatic exacerbation, The Blackout describes the ordinary mode of affective experience as delirium, an ensemble of silhouettes, contours, and overlappings—what Edmund Husserl calls “phantoms.”94 Only by seizing this ensemble can we get at the real.
The film provides a rigorous inventory of delirium’s clinical forms. It articulates three major modes of delirium: gap, fragmentation, and confusion.95 The gap (where there should be something, there is nothing) is the explicit subject of The Blackout, and so it embodies the phenomenon in numerous forms: fades to black, the “shot missing” in Mickey’s film, multiple cracks in the fiction, darkness of every kind, and a veritable parade of lacks (disappeared fœtus, vanished wife, absent mother, forgotten victim).
What is normal perception? Following Husserl, Ludwig Binswanger offers this definition: “Reality, generally, is only possible with the continuously prescribed presumption that experience will be pursued continuously in the same way.”96 What, in opposition to this, is delirium? It is fragmentation, the impossibility of assembling and synthesizing the various aspects of experience. This process proliferates in The Blackout in the form of the fragmented bodies and juxtaposed images filling Mickey’s studio and in the scraps of recollection surfacing in Matty’s memory. But the film especially cultivates confusion, in four modes: coalescence, superimposing two figures; misunderstanding, substituting one figure for another; projection, turning an internal image into an external event (such as when Annie 1 returns in the guise of Annie 2); and repetition, where everything is déjà vu, since delirium essentially consists of a blockage, a scratched-out image that places the world under the regime of cliché in such a way that (in Binswanger’s terms) in the place of stable continuity, “there arises a simple recording.”97 In fact, Matty’s discovery of the truth does not put an end to delirium but brings it to a peak: the horror experienced by the actor in front of the screen as he discovers his crime is followed by Mickey’s hate-filled outburst, then Matty’s impulsive suicide, and the production in the final image of the real as a generalized desertion. Reciprocally, the “recording” does not represent the opposite of delirium but its very essence: the recorded image arises from a demented desire, the video artist’s morbid fantasy. Characters get to that point by taking three successive drugs (alcohol, cocaine, pills); they achieve this state only after the real has returned (Annie 1, who escapes all rules); and they die from looking reality in the face. Thus, chimerical coalescence (cinema) and pure recording (video) do not represent antithetical regimes of images but two sides of the same precise perception—in Ferraran terms, a perception that is delirious from desire.
Three forms of illusion correspond to the forms of dementia (confusion, fragmentation, and gap). The experience of defusing corresponds to confusion. This is the moment of the return of the real: Annie 1, with whom Matty tested the limits of the “given.” The dark massiveness of Annie 1 (black sunglasses and clothes) evokes the real as a pure, opaque block. But she also brings phenomena down to their literal reality: “He looking for me?” she asks Mickey as Matty lies on the floor, dead drunk from alcohol and fatigue, declaring: “I’m not drinking.” In fact, both interpretations are true: Matty drinks, but it is a work of anamnesis that allows him to re-find the image to which now, stupefyingly, Annie 1’s return gives the lie. So Matty has not yet drank enough: he must continue disentangling the images.
The experience of inclusion corresponds to fragmentation. When Matty finds himself faced with the video images of the murder he has committed, he watches them on the same monitor on which he watched Annie 1 dance—so he is already situated within the image that he discovers. We observe a triple embedding: Matty in the image of love where he kisses Annie 1; Matty in the image of death where he watches himself kissing Annie 1 before strangling Annie 2; Matty moving his hand over the screen, as Godard does in Scénario du film Passion (1982). In all three cases, the film puts into play physical effects that are obtained by the most violent optical experiences. In this scene, he kneels before an image—just as he had knelt before his wife’s empty bed—kisses it, suffers for it, and cannot bear it. Matty’s gestures of sacred terror constitute one of the most beautiful homages ever rendered to the power of images.
Finally, trauma corresponds to the experience of gap. The re-found images of the crime are clearly unbearable because they are life itself, and, as Nietzsche said, “It is not doubt, it is certainty which makes one mad.”98 Delirium appears, once and for all, as an intensive relation to the truth, all the more irremediable and obsessive because this truth cannot be escaped.
Virulent Attacks The experience of delirium allows the stretching of the exigency of infinity across all cinematic dimensions. It allows a surpassing of the two fundamental principles upon which orthonormal knowledge rests: identity and discrimination. According to the principle of identity, that which is, is. All “strange cinema” contests the validity of this assertion, by substitution (this mother is not a mother but an alien [Body Snatchers]), complementarity (this man is also another, younger man [Lost Highway]); and superimposition (this woman is and is not the same as some other woman [The Blackout, Vertigo]). The Blackout is not content to merely destabilize the principle of identity in narrative terms. It takes this disorder all the way to the shot level—for example, when Matty prepares to resume drinking, he turns his head towards the bar in his hotel room; instantly, a close-up shows his hand seizing a small bottle from the mini-bar, preceded by the reflection in the glass door of his approach; then the scene returns to him at the window from where, in fact, he has not yet moved. The close-up thus appears at once as a recollection (Matty remembers a conversation with Annie 1 in the same spot, and we hear the aural flashback of his words over the shot: “I told you about Mickey, right? The moment of ‘ahh,’ the moment of ‘ahh’ …”)99 and an anticipation, since he will reproduce the same gesture in a moment.
Then there is the huge noise this tiny bottle makes when it breaks, after Matty, having drank the contents, casually lets it fall to the floor—a disproportionate blast, as if suddenly the event involves a giant bottle. We could go on noting every detail of the film—every match, every sound, every reflection in glass all subtly participates in this principle of unalignment that tears phenomena away from themselves to the extent that things seem to flee, leaving only traces or empty outlines, allowing no “grip” for a consciousness that refuses to go into mourning but joyfully prepares to learn why it has lost all this.
The principle of discrimination also undergoes a virulent attack—an attack all the more systematic in that it works on both Matty and Mickey. According to the discrimination principle, which establishes paradigms on the basis of the identity principle, what is here cannot be elsewhere, what is inside cannot be outside, and so on. Matty wreaks havoc with discrimination by proceeding by subtraction, while Mickey proceeds by superimposition.
• Undifferentiation of one and other. Matty works through subtraction by resorting to disavowal: when he is shown a photo of himself, he responds: “That’s not me, that’s my brother”; when Annie forces him to listen to the insults he made to her over the telephone, he contends, “It ain’t me”; when she tells him that she does not want her son to have a junkie father, he is astounded: “Who’s a junkie?” Inversely, Mickey works by multiplication: to remake Nana, he multiples the cameras, sets, and screens; to help Matty re-find Annie 1, he brings him jAsmiNe and dAphNe and conjures ANNie 2, so that all women relate (at least nominally) to his Nana, including by contagion the saintly susAN.
• Undifferentiation of here and elsewhere. Matty subtracts, which is the mode of transference: when he hallucinates Susan while on the phone, there is no longer any difference between New York and Miami, between here and over there, only a mental space working to annul and compress different places into each other. Inversely, Mickey has organized his apparatus precisely to confuse here and elsewhere but by multiplying one using the other: the erotic images, happening elsewhere, are permanently projected on-set so as to recruit new participants for the orgy shoot.
• Undifferentiation of inside and outside. In the sequence of his return to booze, Matty ends up collapsing, positioned at an angle to the room, window open onto nothingness, the curtains billowing in the wind, half inside and half outside, a space of pure, comatose vertigo. Another procedure, more discreet but even more destabilizing, occurs just before this vertigo. After Susan’s departure, Matty climbs the stairs of his house, opens the door to enter, and then is back on the beach in Miami. The match-cut is almost Buñuelian: to leave, he need only open the door and enter his house, for the world is merely a vast interior space. The doubling of Matty’s face in the beveled glass of his front door shows to what extent the purest of identity-tremors is produced on the very threshold of home. For Mickey, spaces (studio interior, beach exterior, room interior, balcony exterior) overlap in the sense that he always makes the same thing with the same bodies, simple copies of each other. To direct people means for him to erotically possess, supplicate, and kill them (as per the sadistic imagery on every video monitor) to the extent that, under his direction, the most violent superimposition is equally the most literal. Drunk Matty in the hotel confuses his bed with an editing bench because he has already transformed, also when drunk, the editing bench into a bed on which he kissed and then strangled Annie 2. This can be considered as a vivid eroticization of editing analogous to what The Driller Killer does for painting.
The work of undifferentiation can be detailed in the same way with regard to public/private or before/after, and in every case the logic is the same: Matty annuls, and Mickey multiplies. In one sense they correspond to the concrete dual existence of film celluloid: the black interstice that guarantees the interval between two frames (Matty) and the mental overlapping between those two frames that guarantees the illusion of movement (Mickey). Does this mean that cinema itself is a delirious apparatus? Doubtless—after all, it is the greatest hypnosis machine ever institutionalized. But here the analogy between the two protagonists corresponds more broadly to two psychic procedures: Mickey interlinks, while Matty seeks to unlink.
Delirium in The Blackout evokes neither fantasy nor disintegration. It ties together the excessively immediate, numerous, and meaningful relations between images, thus allowing the multiplication of forms of linkage between phenomena. It also allows the description of aspects of bridging and projection in each phenomenon, hence showing how phenomena are not entities but elaborations. When Matty meets Annie 2 he hears Annie 1’s voice and attributes his own story to her—he never truly sees her, content only to look, in her, for the traces of what he has lost. This pretty waitress represents the way in which one never truly sees the Other, woven from self-projections: Annie 2 is the emblem of post-psychoanalytic realism. Delirium ends up seeming a model of construction and inventiveness, thanks to which we see the forms of montage function at their optimum level.
But why should delirium be morbid? Why is disappearance its principal material, immediately put into narrative form as abortion, abandonment, neglect, betrayal, murder, and suicide? As far back as it is possible to go, further even than the abandonment complex, the realm of affect is cemented by (as Binswanger calls it) the Terrible, which is “at the foundation of all experience, of what unites all specific experiences, and what functions even for them as the obligatory connection.”100 This Terrible starts seeping out once psychic defenses tremble. It introduces itself into the slightest interstice and, meeting no resistance, sweeps through the entire construction—just as, in the middle of The Blackout, a black screen breaks the fiction in two, or, at the end, the dark ocean swallows up Matty’s body. And yet the film traces, with this rather alarming material, an almost therapeutic trajectory. It takes us from a passive death (abortion, which is the erasure of someone who never even existed, registered as an indignity) to an active death (suicide, a logical and moral act), to conclude with the final resonant superimposition of love.
Like other great films, including Jean Eustache’s Photos d’Alix (1981), The Blackout entirely reinterprets the cinematic apparatus as a psychic apparatus. But the central stake proves to be less reflexive than existential: to intensify a human experience by following every repercussion and echo provoked by a simple affect—such as the kiss given to a woman by a man who is not really completely “there” in his gesture—and following these traces all the way to their end, if necessary even beyond death. In the absolute exigency of ethical investigation to which it testifies, we could say that the work of this reputedly monstrous, addicted, muddled filmmaker is capable of conserving something of what Durkheim called the “moral patrimony” of humanity.101
Untimely Remains Take a war, such as the first Iraq war of 1991. What does a narrative filmmaker do with it? Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who in that period were staging Sophocles’s Antigone at the Berlin Schaubühne, decided to dedicate their final performance of the play “to the thousands of Iraqis buried without graves (no name or even number) by the American bulldozers.”102 Ferrara made Body Snatchers in 1993, a film populated with the dead who go unburied since they instantly crumble into dust, like bodies disintegrated by bombs. In the early morning this human dust is thrown into garbage trucks that collect the debris of consumer society. The dead do not die; they disappear, secreted from the image in the same way that those sacrificed to the Third World economy are secreted from the collective American imaginary. Hollywood cinema has rarely shown with such violence that to maintain its brutal regime, the American Way of Life—this terrifying economic Moloch—exacts, every morning, a toll of human lives viewed as anonymous and of no value.
In this film of ashes and slag—in which, it is worth remembering, the young soldier Tim (Billy Wirth) has returned from the Gulf War where he admits having killed people—there appears a particularly strange corpse. This corpse completely contravenes the economy of similitude instituted by the principle of snatching (replacement of same by same). It is the father’s corpse, appearing from under the marital bed, which hardly resembles its original. While Steve is a young, almost boyish man, his double looks old, with white, ragged hair, all wrinkled and sticky. With its conspicuous, jutting teeth, this face resembles a skull; with its emphasized muscles and tendons, his body becomes a decomposing corpse, not a gestating fœtus, as is the case for Marti’s double, which is in the process of being born at the same time. I have argued elsewhere how, via this bizarre figure of the born-dead old person, Marti dreams of aborting her father, thus lodging herself at the heart of the father/daughter incest delirium that organizes the film’s figurative logic.103 But the question remains: Why do these untimely remains indeed ultimately resemble someone whom every cinephile immediately recognizes, namely, Abel Ferrara himself?
Naturally, we can attribute this figurative surprise to a “signature effect,” a sort of macabre Hitchcockian touch. But we can also see here a sign that Body Snatchers displaces the question of the corpse, refuting its function as the organic, natural model for the image, whether in André Bazin’s Egyptian version (the “mummy complex” of “embalming the dead”) or Blanchot’s modern version (“cadaverous resemblance”).104 This contravening corpse disturbs the economy of resemblance: evil reflections that effect a spiriting-away. His individuated, wizened flesh suddenly imposes a true effect of presence, as incongruous as it is unassimilable within the fiction. His presence is even more striking because his face is turned towards us and because his viscous hand seizes Marti’s ankle—an act of prehension that is completely transgressive in relation to the self-matting logic of snatching. The iconography evoked by this corpse in mid-putrefaction returns us to other filthy, panting bodies, occupied with similar masquerades of death: the bodies of the Viennese Actionists such as Hermann Nitsch and Günter Brus, exorcising Nazi crimes; or those of Japanese performers, the Gutaï and Yomini Independent groups, refusing to forget Japanese fascism. More profoundly, such artistic initiatives constitute the modern, polemical version of an ancient practice born in Italy during the thirteenth century, the traces of which can be found in Andrea del Sarto or Lorenzetti: infamante painting, which consists of representing, on the wall of some public edifice, the physical result of torture inflicted upon a guilty person.105
To transform oneself into a corpse, a martyr, or something formless and repellent is not a matter of expiating a collective evil but recalling its existence. These simulated remains do not aim to be hidden bodies (that would amount to masking them all over again) but instead manifest as best they can the moral infection that propagates itself beginning with the moment of the Nazi death camps. When Kathy in The Addiction, after leaving the Holocaust museum, injects herself with blood drawn by syringe from the sleeping body of a tramp, it is impossible not to recall the actions of the Czech artist Peter Stembera after the Prague Spring, drawing his own blood and then reinjecting it, mixed with urine, hair, and fingernail clippings, in front of an altar.106 Perhaps one might find an anticipatory fulfillment of Ferrara’s work in the act of Patrick Geoffrois, the protagonist of Michel Bulteau’s film about heroin, Main Line (1971): at one screening, Geoffrois drew his own blood with a syringe and sprayed it onto the cinema screen where the film was then projected.
Fusional Compositions From this self-portrait of the filmmaker as a corpse, one can gauge the extent to which Ferrara’s work innovates in the area of figurative economy, inventing at once a logic and the prime necessity for disturbing that logic. But is this funereal cinema of crime and torment entirely apocalyptic and sacrificial?
The exact opposite claim could be argued. Ferrara’s whole effort is devoted to observing the nature, role, and workings of images within the individual psyche and the collective imaginary. There are plastic images, desirable images for which everyone must be killed (Reno’s painting in The Driller Killer), images to be revivified all the way to giving them mortal form (The Addiction), and shots to make or re-make so that they destroy their protagonists (Dangerous Game, The Blackout). There are also psychic images, present and absent, that confront us with what is unwatchable (within vision) and unavowable (within consciousness): The Driller Killer’s tramps, Eddie’s constitutive cruelty in Dangerous Game, the suffering everywhere. To the extent that Ferrara’s cinema confers, in an argued-out and passionate way, a crucial importance to images, it is clearly an affirmative enterprise.
From the story angle—whatever the type of story—images always find themselves dramatized in terms of obsession, destructive somatization, and death. But after observing the architecture of these films, it becomes clear that their compositional work elaborates contrary values. Sébastien Clerget has shown how The Funeral—a fable of paranoid avidity and the destruction of all by all—is elaborated according to a fusional structure that guarantees a community of consciousnesses. Thanks to a “surplus” shot inscribed within a complex organization of successive flashbacks and repetitions—the shot of Chez passing in a car past the cinema where Johnny gets shot down—“Chez takes over the flashback began by Johnny—the recollection of one becoming the recollection of the other.”107 We have seen how The Blackout translates a single gesture—an ordinary embrace—across the entire length of its trajectory to ultimately reach its devout, sacred version. New Rose Hotel is the director’s most radical film in this regard.
The Blackout poses the question, What is a lacking image? New Rose Hotel proceeds to a critical extension of incomparable audacity, since it is no longer an image (the murder image) that is lacking but all images. And they are truly lacking in that they cannot be recuperated on any other level, whether psychic or plastic. All the key scenes are missing: the meeting of Sandii and Hiroshi, her seduction of him, the betrayal. All action scenes are missing, treated at best as pure sketches: the abduction of Hiroshi to Hosaka headquarters, the theft of the “genetic card,” Fox chased by Maas’s henchmen (all that remains is an unbelievable suicide after an absent chase), the slaughter in the Marrakech laboratory. All secondary scenes are missing: Hiroshi’s renunciation of his wife, scenes of “married life” between Sandii and Hiroshi, the internecine struggles within the Hosaka zaibatsu (without which one can scarcely comprehend events), the explanatory scene between X and the zaibatsu (shot but not included, according to Zois), the scene of Sandii’s resale of the “DNA synthesizer” to Maas (without which one cannot grasp that she is a double agent). Characters are missing: the Hosaka rival gang and Maas are virtually unrepresented, and protagonists suddenly vanish (Hiroshi’s wife, then Sandii). Certain essential characters appear only as images on screens (Hiroshi and his wife) or as unidentifiable silhouettes (Hosaka’s second gang). All characters, in the manner of the limping Fox, prove to be amputated in one way or another: amputated of a past, a history, a name, or an identity, whether an identity they do not possess (X) or one they posses too much, thus remaining nonsynthesizable (Sandii).
The film lacks a resolution on three levels. The first is narrative defection: the final event remains in suspense (X waiting for death, hiding in the little Japanese hotel room—but this is a traditional suspended ending). The second defection is speculative: the symbolic ending remains enigmatic (Sandii’s Mona Lisa smile, which at this level refers to the emblematic western enigma, often associated with the smile of maternity). The third defection is demonstrative: the character of Sandii does not make any sense, whereas in William Gibson’s 1982 short story on which the film is based, she explicitly incarnates a critique of dematerialization within the globalized economy: “And the funny thing, Sandii, is how sometimes you just don’t seem real to me. Fox once said you were ectoplasm, a ghost called up by the extremes of economics. Ghost of the new century, congealing on a thousand beds in the world’s Hyatts, the world’s Hiltons.”108
More troubling still, the film lacks two principal questions. A driving narrative question: What can Hiroshi do with his self-styled “hot proteins”? And a practical question: Where do the images that permanently pop up in the film come from? The world of New Rose Hotel is organized upon a perpetual projection of images, and we understand less and less, as the film proceeds, where these images come from and where they are projected. For example, images of the devastation of the Marrakech laboratory and of the global spread of the Plague appear already edited, but by whom? The images of Hiroshi’s sex life, which is archive footage, can conceivably already have been edited, but we are unable to ascertain where, in space, they are projected. Inversely, when we do witness the production of a shot (Fox and X filming the red geisha orgy), we do not see the result.
The absent, opaque, even impossible nature of the source of these images—symptomatic of a problem of origins—creates several consequences. The images are dematerialized: they are unable to be founded in a practice (in contrast to Mickey’s studio in The Blackout, or Reno’s mind in The Driller Killer). Otherwise, we must formulate a hypothesis that no element of New Rose Hotel backs up—namely, that there exists a sort of world bank of post-Mabusian images. The images are de-realized: nothing can semantically fix them (in contrast to Matty’s fantasies). For example, the film’s subtle prologue, describing the kidnapping attempt on Hiroshi, could be a recollection by X, a video recording by Maas, a mental hypothesis formulated by X, or an objective report on the event addressed by X to Fox. Symmetrically, the hallucinated epilogue of the film, which forms a diptych with the epilogue of The Blackout (a naked man and woman, close enough to touch each other, one the victim of the other, on a mental stage), clearly belongs to X’s reminiscences. But it could not possibly derive from his point of view, which doubles the effect of enigma—ranging from what it signifies (Sandii’s smile) to its provenance and its very status. In New Rose Hotel’s economy, the source and the support of the images disappear; they exist only in their circulation.
So why this ensemble of lacks, transferences, and aporias? Why this world in pieces, fragments, reflections? Why deprive every phenomenon of its cause? Perhaps because the stake of New Rose Hotel concerns the status of woman—the film constitutes, in this respect, the most desperate homage to woman ever made. A question tacitly governs the film’s world: at the moment when life is on the verge of becoming pure genetic manipulation, what becomes of the classical status of woman as life’s origin? (This classical status itself is already partly usurped and highly ambiguous—but that is another question, dealt with in Body Snatchers.) New Rose Hotel, which treats Sandii as at once manipulated (marionette, actress) and manipulatrix (double agent, free electron, enigma, femme fatale), stages a reversal: everything disappears, provided that the woman conserves her prerogatives and her powers, and also provided that she remain the origin of all things (biological life, actions, fantasies), even if, in the process, this source must be conceived as bearing evil intent.
The film elaborates a system of general denial on an anthropological scale: I know very well that woman is no longer the sole origin of life, but I maintain her as she is, and the proof is that she can destroy everything. After Peina and Kathy, Sandii represents a new embodiment of the Pandora myth (prefigured in a minor way by the Louise Brooks–style haircut of Madame Rosa [Annabella Sciorra]), with a computer disc instead of a box as her emblem (the ancient Pandora carried an urn until the sixteenth century).109
The film certainly studies a psychic complex, but not the one that its fable promises. Reduced to its generic iconography, the film’s trajectory would seem to lead us from illusion (puppet Sandii) to disillusion (femme-fatale Sandii). In reality, the path is the opposite. The film’s first half lays bare the elaboration of a trap (Sandii’s casting and rehearsals —the scam itself not shown), while the latter half (which loops the same images slightly thrown out of alignment and revised) works to credit and reinforce a fantasy: Sandii is indeed the sole cause of all evil, she can do anything and be everywhere, there can be no other origin for actions and events (her disappearance in the labyrinth of the zaibatsu and its obscure quarrels). Each phenomenon must be severed from its cause to be able to relate everything en bloc to a sole origin, the accommodating Sandii. Therefore, the pertinent structural couple in New Rose Hotel is not Sandii and X—the fantasy and the mind that produced it. The true pair is Hiroshi and Sandii—the combination of a man who only exists in images and can only give birth to images and clones and a woman who holds the secrets of real biological life, since she holds power over life and death. Hiroshi’s knowledge is limited to mathematical formulae; only Sandii has the capacity to use them.
New Rose Hotel directly tackles an anthropological torment and, to transform it into a poem of amour fou, disintegrates the fiction in such a way that the process of denial appears naked. With its cyberpunk iconography, the film evokes the archaic ritual of conjuration. Ferrara thus transforms a film into a profane prayer, tearing the cinema away from its condition of reflection to commit an act, to fashion a gesture of exorcism and adjuration.
The Great Architectonic Art At the end of the 1970s, Ferrara wanted to adapt one of the most brilliantly composed books in the history of modern literature, The Master and Margarita, written and rewritten by Mikhail Bulgakov between 1929 and 1940.110 This is a novel that terminates its narrative in the middle, just like New Rose Hotel with its narrative “fold”; surreptitiously changes its narrator, like The Funeral; interweaves its stylistics and mirrors its motifs, like Dangerous Game; modernizes the Christian Passion, like Bad Lieutenant, The Addiction, and Love on the A Train; and directs its formal events towards a beyond-writing, like the end of The Blackout.
The trace of Bulgakov’s architectonic art once again emerges in the initial script for Ferrara’s Mary, notably because both are organized according to a parallel montage with three terms. The Master and Margarita—“the Devil’s novel,” as Bulgakov called it—traces a parallel polemic involving contemporary Russia and the story of Pontius Pilate. In Mary, the parallel montage (a basic form of Ferraran architecture, particularly by way of the figurative aspects I have stressed, visual transfer and translation) passes between contemporary New York and the story of Mary Magdalene. The cinema appears ever more clearly here as a great apparatus of symbolic reparation. Beginning from a traumatic television image that has passed into universal iconography—a small Palestinian child dying in its father’s arms under the guns of the Israeli army—the script of Mary experiments with every possible fantasy of reparation: correction of the matrix-image (a nurse, Mary, is discovered off-screen); analytical exegesis (to understand what is truly in this image); transposition (Palestine placed in parallel with the Bronx); and the recreation, multiplication, and transferences, the parallel deliveries of a film and a child.
The cinema of the negative can ultimately aspire to compassion, as long as we understand compassion as having nothing to do with false pacification or aspiring to any fallacious reconciliation. This compassion looks evil in the face and resolves nothing; it cultivates and propagates its rage in the way that rage infects an organism—or as a deathly dream still haunts the mind upon waking.
The epigraph is from Georges Bataille, “Esquisse 2—Dossier de Lascaux,” Œuvres Complètes, vol. 9 (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 321.
1. Quoted in Nick Johnstone, Abel Ferrara: The King of New York (London: Omnibus Press, 1999), 5.
2. Brad Stevens, Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision (London: FAB Press, 2004), 10.
3. Adrian Martin, “Neurosis Hotel: An Introduction to Abel Ferrara,” Program, Twelfth Brisbane International Film Festival (July 2003), 84.
4. Ferrara interviewed by Alain Garel and François Guérif, “American Boy,” La Revue du cinéma 436 (March 1988): 51.
5. See Samuel Blumenfeld, “Recherche Carlos désespérément” (Desperately seeking Carlos), Les Inrockuptibles 52 (10–16 April 1996): 15–19. See also, in the same register, Claire Legendre’s novel Making Of (Paris: Éditions Hors Commerce, 1998), and Elizabeth Herrgott, Abel Ferrara (Paris: Kfilms editions, 1999).
6. In the documentary-portrait by Rafi Pitts, Not Guilty: Abel Ferrara (2003), included in the French DVD of Bad Lieutenant (Wild Side, 2004).
7. Abel Ferrara and Scott Pardo, Mary, draft, October 2000, 64 (privately accessed).
8. Ferrara on the set of “The Club,” Paris Première television, November 1996.
9. Garel and Guérif, “American Boy.”
10. See Giona A. Nazzaro, ed., Abel Ferrara: La tragedia oltre il noir (Abel Ferrara: Tragedy beyond noir) (Rome: Stefano Sorbini Editore, 1997); Pietro Baj, ed., Abel Ferrara (Rome: Dino Audino Editore, 1997); Silvio Danese, Abel Ferrara: L’anarchico e il cattolico (Abel Ferrara: The anarchist and the Catholic) (Genova: Le Mani, 1998); and Alberto Pezzotta, Ferrara (Milan: Il Castoro, 1998).
11. Gavin Smith, “Moon in the Gutter,” Film Comment 26.4 (July–August 1990): 40–46; Kent Jones, “Abel Ferrara—The Man: Who Cares?” Lingo 4 (1995): 30–40.
12. Quoted in Olivier French and John Strausbaugh, “Bad Lieutenant’s Director Still Struggles to Find Screens,” New York Press 15.27 (July 2002): 28.
13. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 96.
14. Gilbert Colon, “The Mark of Abel on a Classic: An Interview with Abel Ferrara,” in “They’re Here” … Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Tribute, ed. Kevin McCarthy and Ed Gorman (New York: Berkley Boulevard Books, 1999), 154.
15. Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Edmund Jephcott, and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 183.
16. Zoë Lund, “The Ship with Eight Sails (and Fifty Black Cannons),” New York Waste, January 2001, available online in the Rouge archive, www.rouge.com.au/stars/02.html.
17. Colon, “Mark of Abel on a Classic,” 153.
18. See Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 82.
19. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988), 18.
20. Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (New York: Marion Boyars, 1985), viii.
21. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 37–38.
22. Emile Durkheim, On Morality and Society: Selected Writings, trans. Mark Traugott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 48.
23. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 251.
24. Siegfried Kracauer, Le roman policier: Un traité philosophique (The crime novel: A philosophical treatise), trans. Geneviève Rochlitz and Rainer Rochlitz (Paris: Payot, 2001), 42.
25. Alexis Philonenko, “Ethique et guerre dans la philosophie de Hegel” (Ethics and war in Hegel’s philosophy), in Essais sur la philosophie de la guerre (Essays on the philosophy of war) (Paris: Vrin, 1976), 63–64. All subsequent citations from this volume appear parenthetically in the text.
26. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 31.
27. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 92–93.
28. Ibid., 93.
29. Bataille, Literature and Evil, 21.
30. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), 82–83.
31. Bataille, Literature and Evil, 120.
32. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 43.
33. Ibid., 80.
34. Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 153–54.
35. Zoë Lund, “The Vampire Speech,” Zoë (Tamerlis) Lund, http://www.lundissimo.info/Zoe/docs/VampireSpeech.html. Lund’s own transcription and layout of the text are followed here.
36. Hegel quoted in Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, 151.
37. Ibid., 150.
38. Bataille, Inner Experience, 35.
39. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 94.
40. Ibid., 102.
41. See David Pellecuer, Taxi Driver: Image, Emotion, Affect (Paris: Mémoire de Maîtrise, Paris I, 1998).
42. For a more detailed analysis of the character of Frank White, see Sébastien Clerget and Nicole Brenez, “White Shadow,” Admiranda 11.12 (1996): 21–30; and Nicole Brenez, “Frankly White,” in De la figure en général at du corps en particulier: L’invention figurative au cinéma (On the figure in general and the body in particular: Figurative invention in cinema) (Brussels: De Boeck, 1998), 225–38.
43. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “‘The Kind of Rage I Feel’: A Conversation with Joachim von Mengershausen about Love Is Colder Than Death,” in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, trans. Krishna Winston (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 3.
44. Nicole Brenez and Agathe Dreyfus, “Entretien avec Zoë Lund,” Admiranda 11.12 (1996): 244.
45. All of these appear in Nicole Brenez, ed., Edouard de Laurot: Collected Writings (Melbourne: Rouge Press, forthcoming). All subsequent quotations from this edition appear parenthetically in the text.
46. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” in Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin-American Cinema, ed. Michael Chanan (London: British Film Institute/Channel 4, 1989), 17–28.
47. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saint Paul, trans. Giovanni Joppolo (Paris: Flammarion, 1980).
48. Nicholas St. John, The First Forty-Eight Hours of John Temple’s Eternity (The Funeral), original screenplay, 24 (privately accessed).
49. Franchise Pictures, press release, Abel Ferrara: Internet Library, www.miscellanea.de/film/Abel_Ferrara/news.htm.
50. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 27. Lund’s unfinished trilogy has not been published; the author privately accessed the manuscript.
51. Antonio Gramsci, “Politics as an Autonomous Science,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 140.
52. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 131.
53. Thomas Hobbes, “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery,” in Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 83.
54. St. John, First Forty-Eight Hours, 26.
55. Nicholas St. John, Snake Eyes, draft, 18 November 1992, 68 (privately accessed).
56. Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 288–89.
57. Bataille, Inner Experience, 42.
58. Stevens, Abel Ferrara, 117.
59. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 65.
60. Marc Voinchet, “Des ombres argentées” (Silvery shadows), interview with Abel Ferrara, Entrelacs 2 (October 1994): 105.
61. Hesiod and Theognis, Theogony, Works and Days and Elegies (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973), 23–57.
62. For further discussion of the principle of snatching, see Nicole Brenez, “Come into My Sleep,” Rouge 6 (May 2005), www.rouge.com.au/rougerouge/sleep.html.
63. John Milton, Paradise Lost (London: Penguin, 2003), 6 (book 1, l.124).
64. Bataille, Literature and Evil, 85–86.
65. Milton, Paradise Lost, 65 (book 3, l.496).
66. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Hertfordshire, U.K.: Wordsworth, 2000), 156.
67. Bataille, Literature and Evil, 83.
68. Milton, Paradise Lost, 216 (book 9, ll.1187–89).
69. Emma Goldman, “The Psychology of Political Violence,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), 80.
70. Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 8.
71. See Gianfranco Sanguinetti, On Terrorism and the State, trans. Lucy Forsyth and Michel Prigent (London: Chronos, 1982).
72. Marla Hanson, Christ Zois, and Abel Ferrara, The Blackout, revised script, 9 July 1996, 37 (privately accessed).
73. Zoë Lund, Bad Lieutenant, final revised script, 3 October 1991, 59 (avaliable at the Internet Movie Script Database, www.imsdb.com/scripts/Bad-Lieutenant.html).
74. St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), 62.
75. Lund, Bad Lieutenant, 26.
76. Sébastien Clerget, “Hérédité du crime” (Heredity of crime), Simulacres 7 (November 2002): 64.
77. Christ L. Zois and Margaret Scarpa, Short-Term Therapy Techniques (New York: Jason Aronson, 1997), 34.
78. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 239.
79. For a literary remake of this sequence, see Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (New York: Vintage, 1991), 126–32.
80. St. Augustine of Hippo, The Trinity, book 13, sec. 26 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1963), 408.
81. Kracauer, Le roman policier, 53.
82. Nicholas St. John, The Addiction, draft, July 1991, 16 (privately accessed).
83. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and the Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1995), 188–89.
84. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 72.
85. Clinical definitions from Thérapeutique et Informations, “Glossary of Mental Disorders,” http://thera.info/icd9–cm/icd9–cm-glossary-mental-diseases.pdf.
86. See Adrian Martin, “The Misleading Man: Dennis Hopper,” in Stars in Our Eyes: The Star Phenomenon in the Contemporary Era, ed. Angela Ndalianis and Charlotte Henry (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), 2–19.
87. See Daniel Lagache, “Passions et psychoses passionnelles” (Passions and passionate psychoses), in Les hallucinations verbales et travaux cliniques (Verbal hallucinations and clinical works), vol. 1: 1932–46 (Paris: PUF, 1977), 136–54.
88. Julien-Daniel Guelfi, DSM-III: Manuel diagnostique et statistique des troubles mentaux (manual diagnostic and statistics of the mental disorders) (Paris: Masson, 1986), 186.
89. See André Green, “Le travail du négatif et l’hallucinatoire (l’hallucination negative)” (Work of the negative and the hallucinatory [negative hallucination]), in Le travail du négatif (Manual diagnostic and statistics of the mental disorders) (Paris: Minuit, 1993), 217–87.
90. Sylvie Le Poulichet, “Toxicomanies” (Drug-related manias), in L’Apport freudien (Paris: Bordas, 1993), 448.
91. S. Nacht and P. C. Racamier, “La théorie psychanalytique du délire” (The psychoanalytic theory of delirium), Revue française de Psychanalyse 22.4–5 (1958): 439.
92. Ibid., 439.
93. Ibid., 497.
94. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 132–54.
95. Ludwig Binswanger, Délire: Contribution à son étude phénoménologique et daseinalytique (Delirium: A contribution to its phenomenological and deseinalytic study) (Paris: Jérôme Million, 1993).
96. Binswanger’s definition was first elaborated in his Mélancholie et manie: Études phénoménologiques (Melancholia and mania: Phenomenological studies). It is quoted in Délire, 48.
97. Ibid., 91.
98. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1992), 29.
99. See Dennis Hopper and Henry T. Hopkins, “The Seductive Sixties,” in Dennis Hopper: A System of Moments, ed. Peter Noever (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001), 35.
100. Binswanger, Délire, 29.
101. Emile Durkheim, On Morality and Society, 56.
102. François Albera, “Avant-Propos,” in Sophocles, Friedrich Hölderlin, Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Autour d’Antigone (Lausanne: Université de Lausanne, 1993), 7.
103. Brenez, “Come into My Sleep.”
104. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 9–16; Maurice Blanchot, “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (New York: Station Hill, 1999), 417–28.
105. See Gherardo Ortalli, La Pittura Infamante nei Secoli XIII-XVI (Infamante painting in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries) (Roma: Jouvence, 1979).
106. See Paul Schimmel, ed., Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998).
107. Clerget, “Hérédite du crime,” 67.
108. William Gibson, “New Rose Hotel,” in Burning Chrome and Other Stories (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 137.
109. Dora Panofsky and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythological Symbol (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).
110. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. Michael Glenny (London: Collins Harvill, 1988).
