A transcendental process: sensuality,
dream elements, and perception of life in
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Like Suspiria, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, apparently takes direct inspiration from an older film, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992) despite Werner Herzog’s unconvincing claims to the contrary. The plot similarities are apparent. Similar to the two versions of Suspiria, the films differ in their concept of guilt. Ferrara’s narrative is built around the idea of an intended redemption and, in a Dostoyevskian tradition, it ties this journey to a lonely individual wandering in a hostile environment. Ferrara’s idea of redemption is religious (Catholic); thus, it takes for granted a platonic or neo-platonic conception that the world of the flesh is an illusion and gradual redemption comes through escaping flesh’s numerous temptations and will lead towards interiority and self-discovery.

Werner Herzog’s spirituality can be interpreted as mystical or even sensual, ecstatic, built on the experiences of the body and of everyday perception. Perception in itself, is to be understood as a corporeal process. Guilt plays undoubtedly an important role in Herzog’s worldview as well, but it is linked more to a need for a conscious participation in everyday life, an existential call for living authentically, rather than to a traditional moral system.

The very first shot of Herzog’s film is the image of a snake, swimming alone in dark, dirty waters. Very soon we will come to realize the action takes place in an abandoned police station in a post hurricane Katrina, deserted New Orleans. Visually though, this image in itself, nature invading a previous urban environment, a lonely serpent that struggles to find its way in unknown waters, summarizes the film’s narrative and thematic structure.

The first action of Terence McDonagh (Nicholas Cage) is indeed a traditionally “good” deed, saving a drowning Mexican prisoner, an act that will result in McDonagh’s subsequent injury and later gradual physical and mental downfall. The incident will also frame the film, as McDonagh will meet that person again in a final reconciliation. That ending is notably absent from the original script but here is one of his numerous encounters with socially oppressed people, notably the five illegal immigrants from Senegal, whose murder by the local mafia initiates the plot.

The film blurs dream and reality, subjectivity and participation in existing social structures, as well as trust in intuition over rationality. Such blurred psychic spaces clearly play a role in in the spoon incident, a childhood memory shared with Frankie (Eva Mendes) about quixotic quests and unfulfilled promises. Again, this is a scene added by Herzog, not present in the William M. Finkelstein screenplay.

While Herzog does not abandon his documentary influences (seen in the highly ritualistic funeral sequence), more memorable are dream-like situations and spoken questions (“Do fish have dreams”?) that give the film an air of sadness. For example, the inclusion of a child’s poem next to the first crime scene (“my friend is a fish,he lives in my room, his fin is a cloud he see me when i sleep”) seems to tie together the narrative’s dominant motifs. In their combination, they often give the feeling of a fever dream to what otherwise could be perceived as a script full of predictable action and succession of events and generic conventions. Those motifs are:

• animalistic motifs associated with the ecstatic. Herzog makes various visual references to fish, alligators, snakes, and even iguanas.
• return to childhood and its courageous feelings of amazement as a poetic, artistically sensitive way to approach otherness. The child’s phenomenological focus on observation.
• water, giving the environment a constant, literal fluidity. The motif of a sinking town in a noir environment perhaps has roots in Chinatown (Roman Polansky,1974), where we have the opposite motif: the lack of water, the idea of a thirsty city (‘’Los Angeles is dying of thirst”).

The plot also structures events around hallucinogens and other psychedelic drugs, but that seems to me like an excuse for the inclusion of powerful surreal visuals rather than a realist depiction of a modern urban environment. On the contrary, the film’s archaic, ritualistic, irrational elements seem to allude to an intended ecstatic flight, an intended transcendental process.

The water as a motif. And the snake, first image of the film...	“Do fish have dreams?”
Poetry and lyricism in everyday life. Babacar’s poem.	The absence of water in Polanski’s Chinatown. Echoed in the sinking city of Bad Lieutenant. Cities in peril.

Physicality and poetic fantasy in
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.   
Herzog’s social conscience.

As I observe Terence McDonagh’s existential journey, I would like to draw attention to moments that help us clarify the film’s ideological and philosophical focus. It has a scheme of corporeality and transcendence that I already discussed in relation to Suspiria, and it uses those themes in a way that differentiates it the plot about male anxiety and a religious pilgrimage towards salvation traced in Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant.

In contrast to Ferrara’s Christian existentialism, according to which transcendence allows escape from the limitations of the human body, Herzog links observation of the world to corporeal experiences, in particular through the film’s emphasis on physical pain, absent in the original script. It is McDonagh’s back pain, not in a symbolic but literal dimension, that motivates the plot. This physicality is also found in the erotic relationship between the two main characters, tender, built on verbal communication, earthy (and devoid of Ferrara’s tying sexuality to sin). Herzog then ties that eroticism to the more complex phenomenological notion of sensuality which lie at the heart of the film. Poetic fantasy (The question “Do fish have dreams?”, a Quixotic search for the spoon) are linked here with artistic production and such fantasy is carefully implied as the natural culmination of a policeman’s search. 

Of course, violence and identification with the state, as negative forces, are also part of police investigation. The difference between Suspiria and Bad Lieutenant when it comes to depicting police work and power structures in general depends on the fact that for Herzog police violence is a Dionysian, destructive aspect of transcendental experience, haunting rather than reassuring, important as a liberating step towards the self-fulfillment of the already tormented subject, rather than a gift for society as a whole. It is definitely related to individual experience, not something to be actively sought and protected by a collective institution.

Do the two films offer any possibility for revolt or resistance? Suspiria depicts acts of political violence, not necessarily in a negative light, yet understands them, stately, as ways for self-expression rather than as possible alternatives or threats to the status quo:

“She wanted to live her beliefs. Who doesn't admire that? And there's so much to change in the world. If she wants to live in a cellar filling bottle with petrol, that's her choice. And who won't be heartbroken if she's shot by police”.

The ideological role of the Dance Academy is never too clear. For example, are the witches, even the Blanc fraction to be understood as progressive spirits or regressive in their identity and intentions? That plot development makes the film’s political stance even more enigmatic. Overall, the ecstatic dance and the sensuality it stands for, depicted as a way to communicate with the world, is seen as a personal, rather than social, possible revolt. Bad Lieutenant, more unapologetically and in accordance with the subjectivism of both film noir and existentialism, once more seems to deny such a political possibility outside the realm of inner life. And yet, the film’s social consciousness makes such contradictions appear intentional, relevant to the natural limitations of the main character.

Another Herzog film, Cobra Verde (1987), closes with a lyrical promise of a future awakening of those who are oppressed, a promise visually linked to the ecstatic. Even if such a clear statement is not to be found on the melancholy vibes of the journey depicted in Bad Lieutenant. the priority placed on perception and a concern for otherness, two concepts the film is built on, built steadily towards advocating authentic living and social sensitivity. The question, ‘’Do Fish have dreams?’’, this desire to come in terms with unsuspected dreams of other entities can be interpreted as the complete opposite of the “need for guilt and shame” declared by Susie in Suspiria. Guilt for Herzog is to be understood in its social rather than religious associations. It’s not a goal in itself, nor a unifying factor that holds society together, as Susie implies; Bad Lieutenant’s guilt encourages him to live consciously and come in terms with otherness.

Final thoughts:
corporeality, transcendence and the police state

Corporeality and transcendence, as relative rather than opposite forces, express a phenomenological emphasis on the flesh and a desire to define oneself in relation to the world of everyday life. It’s not necessarily an opposition to the world, but clearly an agonizing approach. Reconciliation with the environment is actually suggested in both films, even if the two filmmakers understand such “reconciliation” in different ways. This kind of reconciliation is violent but necessary for Guadagnino, the only way to approach an aestheticist poetic quality of life in a hostile climate. For the more optimistic Herzog, it is melancholy, but creative, poetic in itself.

The police state in Suspiria is more powerful than ever. Not in the sense of actual state power but in symbolic representation, as a necessary way to guard one’s dreams and inner fears. Suspiria fantasizes an educated, sensitive elite, nevertheless built on surveillance and violence, that gives expression to personal needs and even helps empowering artistic inclinations to find fulfilment. The positive light under which violence is glorified, the contempt for the weaker, and the ecstatic romantic iconography (destruction as art) seem to evoke Susan Sontag’s Fascinating Fascism, written in 1974, during the period where the film takes place. And yet a question mark remains when it comes to ascertaining the moral stance of the film—Is Susie to be perceived as a positive heroine after all? Or an enigmatic figure not unlike Patricia Highsmith’s charming and yet destructive individuals? For me, this ambiguity makes the above often contradictory themes and motifs complicated and fascinating, rather than dogmatic.

In Bad Lieutenant: Port of call New Orleans understanding a police state is once more linked to ecstatic dance, experiencing reality as a dream, and a journey towards self-discovery. Not unlike Antonioni’s Blow-up, the narrative and the protagonist’s wandering don’t necessarily lead to an answer but rather indicate the openness of possibilities in the world. Irony here is even clearer than it is in Suspiria. And both films use a narrative about the necessity of violence not as a joyful resolution but with an unmistakable air of sadness. 

Collectively the two texts share a phenomenological emphasis on the senses, on corporeality as a way to experience reality, and they consciously avoid giving concrete answers in the fundamental questions they raise. And yet one feels a certain freedom that is consistent to their mythic quality. It’s found in this openness, this acceptance of contradictions, even political contradictions, or this clear tendency to identify with the oppressing character or institution, rather than the oppressed party. That’s a vital part of both the social structure and their narrative world. The films depict the threat of a police state, or even, to borrow the term from Sontag, the fascinating hypnotic aspects that such a state could well present in other contexts. Here that threat is linked to a quest for subjective experience. That motif unites these two stories, seemingly so different in their aesthetic references. Under such a light, the two films' often contradictory but always palpating visual and theoretical themes; their call for freedom and the phenomenological sensitivity they focus on as well as the importance they give to the human body; what they state, and what they choose not to state; what they imply—all these become even more relevant to us in times of both subjective anxieties and constant social concern.