Bad Lieutenant · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the howl. Late in the film, in the nave of a desecrated church, Harvey Keitel's unnamed Lieutenant goes down on his knees, arms loose, weeping and bellowing at a figure of Christ that may be a hallucination and may be an apparition — Ferrara keeps the line deliberately smudged. He is naked of everything by now: badge, money, marriage, the last membrane of self-control. Nothing he can do will change his situation. He can only kneel and look and wail. Hold that image, because the whole film is the slope that delivers a man to it.

Deleuze gives us the precise name for the rest of the movie that precedes the church: the impulse-image. It sits, in his scheme, between the close-up of feeling and the clean cause-and-effect of the action film — a degenerate, fallen kind of action, where a man is moved not by goals but by appetites that use him up. Drugs, gambling, sex, the badge cashed in for a grope or a bribe: the Lieutenant doesn't pursue these the way a detective pursues a case. They pursue him. Each act reads less as a decision than as a symptom — Deleuze's word for behavior that exposes a buried drive rather than a plan. When Keitel pulls two young women over and coerces them through the car window, masturbating, the scene held in one unbroken take that refuses you the mercy of a cut, you are not watching a man do something. You are watching a compulsion run its course through a body, in real time, until it empties.

What makes Ferrara a true naturalist — in the lineage Deleuze traces back through Zola to Stroheim and Buñuel — is that he builds a whole originary world under the city. New York here is a derived milieu: precinct, bar, cluttered apartment, the church itself, all of them real locations shot by Ken Kelsch in degraded available light, sodium-orange streets and fluorescent green and muddy black. But these are only the visible crust. Beneath them Ferrara exposes an older, savage world of pure drive, where everyone is feeding on something. The long scene with Zoë Lund — co-writer, former star of his Ms. 45 — cooking and shooting up alongside Keitel, then articulating the film's bleak philosophy aloud, is the originary world speaking its own gospel: the body as the only church, the high as the only grace.

And it has a direction. Deleuze calls it the line of slope — the irreversible downward gradient toward exhaustion and death that governs every impulse-image. Bad Lieutenant makes that line audible. The recurring radio play-by-play of the Mets–Dodgers playoff threads through unrelated scenes, and the editing (Anthony Redman's) lets it bind the loose episodes into a single tightening noose: every inning the Lieutenant's bet goes worse, until a gambling debt has quietly become a death sentence. A profane liturgy, that broadcast — answering, scene for scene, the sacred one waiting in the church. The stolen chalice and ciborium are the film's true fetishes, part-objects charged with a force the Lieutenant can neither honor nor leave alone.

Then something breaks, and Deleuze's vocabulary breaks with it. The whole machinery of the impulse-image assumes a man who can still act, however foully. The nun shatters that. Raped at her own altar, she forgives her rapists and refuses to name them. Her grace is unbearable precisely because it is useless to a sensory-motor world — you cannot act on forgiveness, you can only receive it or not. In front of it the Lieutenant becomes what Deleuze calls a seer (voyant): no longer an agent, just a watcher and endurer of a situation too large to be solved. The church climax is a pure optical and sound situation — an opsign — where action has drained out and only seeing and hearing remain, Joe Delia's elegiac score carrying a catharsis the dialogue will not speak. Deleuze argued that this is exactly the hinge where the movement-image cracks open into the time-image: the moment a character can no longer respond adequately to what he perceives. Ferrara reaches it not through European stillness but through abjection — the camera simply sitting, in dead time, watching humiliation past the point of comfort.

That howl, finally, is what Deleuze would call a gest: a posture that lays bare a whole relation — here, a Catholic body offering itself, arms spread in an involuntary crucifixion it cannot mean and cannot stop meaning. It is cinema of the body, duration carried by behavior rather than plot.

The craft debts are exact. Mean Streets handed Ferrara both Keitel and the red-lit, handheld grammar of Catholic guilt worked out in bars and churches; Taxi Driver supplied the abyss-stare of one man cruising a corrupted city toward reckoning; Shadows and Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie licensed the long take that lets a performance run past comfort, scenes shaped around a body's behavior instead of beats. Ferrara's invention was to fuse that downtown realism with the saint's-life — to film damnation as a literal subject and let an actor disintegrate inside it without a net.

What it did to film: it proved the impulse-image could be pushed to its absolute limit, the slope ridden all the way down, and that at the bottom the time-image is waiting — that abjection, held long enough, becomes contemplation. Watch it again for the radio. The score keeps the count of a soul the way the broadcast keeps the count of the game, and both are running out at once.