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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 56: From dusk till dawn

Quentin Tarantino, whom my dear cousin, Adam, unfortunately resembles, is the writer of this movie, and one of its stars. (The director is Robert Rodriguez.) The Tarantino character robs banks; takes women as hostages, and then rapes and kills them; lusts after the under-aged; is singled out for a table dance by the most glamorous and dominating woman in the movie (Selma Hayek); and, in general, is perverse, paranoid, vindictive, and disgusting. Eventually, he is turned into a vampire. I wouldn’t be surprised if vampirism were another of Tarantino’s personal fetishes. It’s as if Tarantino assigned all the juiciest vices to himself and then got someone else to direct him enacting them. The Tarantino character and his ruthless but slightly more judicious brother (George Clooney) are on the lam trying to cross from Texas to Mexico. A gleeful reporter (Kelly Preston) details their crimes for the TV. It’s a long and terrible list. This is my favorite scene because the crimes are ennumerated but not shown. One gathers that most of the crimes weren’t strictly necessary. The same could be said of almost everything in the movie, which is a labor of love – love of sin.

Having murdered their previous hostages, the brothers pick up three more: a doubting preacher (Harvey Keitel), his daughter (Juliette Lewis), and his son (Ernest Liu). These hostages have more grit than the others, and so they last long enough to develop a touch of Stockholm syndrome – the fresh-faced daughter, especially. The rogues and the hostages hunker down for the night in a trucker bar. Caligula would have liked this bar. It has lots of table dancers and grotesque lowlifes played by such actors as Danny Trejo and Cheech Marin (who also plays two other characters). Here the rogues’ sins catch up with them. It turns out that the bar is run by vampires. I hope I’m not giving too much away.

In the rest of the movie, the living fight the undead. They use all the standard vampire-killing techniques. Well, almost all of them.

What about silver?, asks one of the characters.

Isn’t silver for killing werewolves?

Well, yeah, silver bullets are, but what about silver in general?

Then the daughter hostage asks the sensible question: Does anyone actually have any silver? No? Then it doesn’t matter.

The vampires aren’t tormented and joyless, as in Dracula; they’re more like the jolly creatures in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. What both sorts of monsters have in common is insatiable lust and a certain diabolical amiability. The awkward, hot-headed Tarantino could never receive a high grade as a vampire. Clooney, more suave, is a better candidate for vampirism. But his character is insufficiently lustful. I already have a wife, he tells the Hayek vampire before he impales her with a chandelier.

See, I am falling into the trap of responding to the nerd-pervert on his own terms: A, more than B, has the authentic qualities of a vampire. That is to accord too much respect to a pretty worthless connoisseurist pursuit. Probably, some gutters are more authentically gutter-like than others, but that doesn’t mean it’s good to play in gutters. I’m not saying that vampires don’t make compelling literary figures. Dracula is compelling. I’m saying that you aren’t supposed to like vampires, and that there’s something wrong with you if you do. The Cheech Marin barman, also, is a vulgar connoisseur; in one speech, he expounds upon the varieties of female genitalia on offer in his bar. He describes them with lurid cheer, as objects for the indulgence of one’s basest instincts. This seems to be Tarantino’s attitude toward a lot of things. Or maybe it’s just his shtick. Take some base pursuit (cruelty, lust, revenge, etc.) and dress it up as slickly as possible to revel in it.

And yet, I didn’t hate the movie. The Keitel character is dragged into a monsters’ funhouse, but he retains his decency. So do the Lewis and Liu characters. Tarantino is capable of respecting the non-fetishists in his movies; his underlying plea, I think, is: See, I can appreciate your goodness; just let me play here, in my own awful little corner. Or, at least, that was his early message. Then, as the years went along, he acknowledged that wickedness bleeds into everything, and he started making movies about fighting fire with fire, about torturing Nazis, slavers, and the like.

See also this textbook.

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.