1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 68: The addiction

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is a PhD candidate at a Lower Manhattan institution called the University of New York. She studies philosophy, but in this movie the discipline arguably stands for all of the humanities and social sciences. The discipline doesn’t seem very rigorous. Professors and students recite quotations to each other and solemnly contemplate photos of atrocities (the massacre at My Lai, the Nazi death camps). They talk about evil and determinism and free will. These are important topics, but I failed to detect much cogency in the discussions.

And yet this is an “ideas” movie. The main idea is downright traditional. It comes from theology, and it’s voiced by a vampire (Annabella Sciorra).

R.C. Sproul said we’re not sinners because we sin, but we sin because we are sinners. In more accessible terms, we’re not evil because of the evil we do, but we do evil because we are evil. Yeah. Now, what choices do such people have? It’s not like we have any options.

I never thought I’d hear R.C. Sproul invoked in a vampire movie, but what do you know, the director is Abel Ferrara, who is old-school and eclectic; he grew up Catholic and, despite having converted to Buddhism, appears to still trouble himself over original sin and heaven and hell. He also has used heroin and known people who were destroyed by that drug. In this movie, sinfulness is likened to bloodlust, which is likened to a craving for heroin.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The vampire pulls Kathleen into a dark alley and gives her a choice. Tell me to go away, the vampire says. Tell me like you mean it.

Kathleen just says, Please.

The vampire bites her.

Has the vampire passed the craving on to Kathleen, or did Kathleen already have it? Arguably, what the vampire passes on is awareness of the craving, not the craving itself.

In the rest of the movie, Kathleen goes around biting people. She presents them with the same choice that she was presented with. When a person isn’t prepared to tell her to go away, she turns him or her into a vampire; she gives the person an education.

The person already has the craving, deep down.

One of her university classmates, as yet unbitten, reads philosophy while eating a hamburger. Kathleen is repulsed. The two activities shouldn’t be paired. The point of philosophizing is to enable one to resist one’s cravings. Philosophizing turns out to be a pitifully ineffective pursuit.

Kathleen becomes disenchanted with her studies.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Kathleen apprentices herself to a guru, an older vampire played by Christopher Walken (of course) who claims to have learned to “manage” his bloodlust.

You know how long I’ve been fasting? Forty years. The last time I shot up, I had a dozen and a half in one night. They fall like flies before the hunger, don’t they? You can never get enough, can you? But you learn to control it. You learn, like the Tibetans, to survive on a little.

It’s hot air. Before long, the creep is belittling Kathleen and sucking out her blood, leaving her more despairing and famished than ever.

Of course Christopher Walken would be the movie’s closest thing to Satan.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Everyone was guilty of what happened at My Lai, Kathleen initially argues (this is in an early scene, before she is bitten). The man who was punished for the atrocity was a scapegoat. Everyone should be forced to come to terms with the guilt.

She means that the guilt is collective – everyone contributed to some injustice that brought about the My Lai atrocity. After she is bitten, a more horrific truth is made evident to her: atrocities are committed because of an evil already in the perpetrator, an evil that lives in each person, that can only be curbed by death to the self, perhaps only by literal death. But death isn’t a choice for vampires, who are addicted, agonizingly, to sucking up life, to prolonging deathlessness.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I checked out a library book by two local philosophers: The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. It’s a self-help book. Here is how philosophy can help you to live well.

It’s an easy book to read, but I’ve had it for weeks and now I’m out of renewals. I’m having trouble building up sufficient enthusiasm to get through it. Something about the book feels too pat.

Not having read much of it, I don’t want to criticize it; but after I saw The Addiction, I looked up terms like original sin, sin, and salvation in the index. Nada.

Odd, because I know that at least one of the co-authors is a Christian.

Here’s what I think Ferrara would say about this book.

Go ahead. Use philosophy. Question. Make a life-plan. Cultivate good dispositions in yourself.

You’ll still be addicted to sin.

The cravings will still rack you. You’ll still give in to them.

You still won’t be able to withstand the light. You’ll still flinch away from mirrors.

C.S. Lewis writes about an addict in The Great Divorce. The addict is powerless to rid himself of his addiction, which is like a fiendish companion that perches upon his shoulder. An angel offers to help the addict. Shall I kill it? he asks. The addict needs his addiction killed, not managed, not held in check by virtues methodically cultivated. And if the addiction is inseparable from the addict’s life, the addict needs to die. But that needn’t be the end. Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life.”

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 41: Normal life

Look who visited! Our high school teacher, Mr. Quiring – all the way from his new home in Nebraska. Here he poses with Mary, Stephen, and me.

Mrs. Quiring visited, too. We learned that she used to grade our reading journals (with terrific speed, as I recall). Credit to her.

Mr. Quiring was a good teacher when I was in school; ten years later, when I visited his class – Stephen was his student then – I thought he was even better. Afterward, he must have improved even more (although, now, he hasn’t been a classroom teacher for several years).

Yesterday he was brimming with pedagogical ideas – perhaps because he was in a room of teachers.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Normal Life

This sad movie is in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Deep Crimson (also released in 1996), and, later, Monster. The criminal twosomes seem less glamorous and more pitiful with each passing movie. (I am not including The Honeymoon Killers, which I haven’t seen.) The distinctive feature of Normal Life is how mismatched and disconnected from one another the two criminals are. They quarrel their way through a pretty appalling marriage before they begin robbing banks. At first, they don’t even rob together; it’s the straitlaced husband, the ex-cop (Luke Perry), who does it by himself to make up for the spending of his unstable wife (Ashley Judd). But it’s the chilling, heartless wife who’s the adrenaline junkie. Once she learns what her husband is doing, she wants in on the fun, and it’s only a matter of time until each of them goes out in a (separate) blaze of glory. Another good movie that Normal Life reminds me of is At Close Range, with a criminal father-son duo played by Christopher Walken and Sean Penn. Both of these movies evoke a brutal U.S. ordinariness – in At Close Range it’s rural Pennsylvania, and in Normal Life it’s the blander Chicago suburbs. No poetry here – this isn’t Badlands. Normal Life opens with a long drive past suburban housing developments and strip malls. It’s almost painful how similar they are to the housing developments and strip malls of today. The movie was filmed on streets and in parking lots and banks where the real-life robbers operated; the locations couldn’t have been more generic if they’d been scouted.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 17: The funeral

In 1995, Abel Ferrara released The Addiction, which was about a philosophy graduate student/vampire. The characters in his 1996 movie, The Funeral, also live as if they’re damned.

They’re philosophizing mobsters, not vampires. One of them, the youngest brother – Johnny, played by the skeletal Vincent Gallo – has just been killed. The family is in mourning. They’re keenly aware that death is their lot, too.

For the oldest brother, Ray – played by Christopher Walken – the event of dying is just another cinder in the lake of fire.

“I’ll roast in hell,” he says several times (and since it’s Walken saying it, it’s compelling).

He’s already roasting. It’s been that way since, as a child, he was brutally inducted into the family’s line of work.

A priest comes to Johnny’s funeral. Ray can’t stand to be near him, so he goes outside and sits in his car. It’s not that he doesn’t believe, it’s that he’s damned already. The priest goes through the motions, attending to the corpse and comforting the family, and then he summons Ray’s wife, Jean (Annabella Sciorra), for a chat. Your family goes to church, he says, but it needs to do a complete reversal of its “practical atheism” to climb out of this rut of violence.

The problem is, this isn’t an atheistic family, it’s a satanic one. One of their gangster minions is even named Ghouly, and he does a macabre dance.

Of the three brothers, it was Johnny who relished his satanic role. In flashback scenes, he dabbles in pro-union political activity – not idealistically, but out temperamental skewedness, since his own family is paid by industrialists to persecute the unions. After the funeral, Ray can’t acknowledge this fact about Johnny. Johnny was a communist, he insists. Not an anarchist. But other scenes make it clear that whatever Johnny did, he did out of perversity.

Ray rationalizes other things, too:

Ray: “All them Catholics gone insane. Everything we do depends on free choice, but at the same time, they say we need the grace of God to do what’s right. I don’t follow that, Jeany. If I do something wrong, it’s because God didn’t give me the grace to do what’s right. If this world stinks, it’s His fault. I’m only working with what I’ve been given.”

Jean: “Is that why the people they find with the bullet holes in their skulls is God’s fault? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

Ray: “I’m ashamed of nothing. I didn’t make the world.”

Jean: “But you’re not doing anything to make it better.”

Ray: “Yeah, and I’ll roast in hell.”

Damnation, he reasons, is something he can’t do anything about. It isn’t his fault: it’s God’s. And since he’s damned and it isn’t his fault, he may as well keep killing.

The middle brother, Chez (Chris Penn), is the most human. He lacks the coldness of his brothers. This doesn’t make him any less brutal. In one scene, he offers to extend mercy to a prostitute. When she doesn’t respond to his liking, he punishes her, angrily, but also with a terrible logic. “You sold your soul,” he tells her.

The wives live in fear and resignation. Chez’s wife, Clara (Isabella Rossellini), prays to Agnes, the patron saint of chastity, whose killer martyred her in a frenzy of lust. Clara doesn’t pray to obtain Agnes’s help, but to remind herself that the men will always take whatever they desire.

What do the men desire, then? Relief from their constant torture? Maybe Johnny wants this. He tells a friend: “I would say life is pretty pointless, wouldn’t you, without the movies.” He is gunned down in a relatively good mood, outside a cinema.

Chez and Ray enjoy no such relief. They always suffer. Their quest is for justice, which they go around pretending to administer to others – although they know it can never console them. Because they’re damned.

One technical note. The soundtrack is superb. It consists of period jazz (the year is 1939, I believe) and also of brief, piercing strains of orchestral strings. This isn’t only a ponderous, gloomy movie. It’s also a razor-sharp one. The string music makes the scenes feel more knife-like.