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Popular Culture Review
The Nietzschean interpretation emerging from Bad Lieutenant is found
in the concept of Christian pity as anti-natural. The act of the policeman letting
the rapists go ran counter to his civic duty to arrest the perpetrators, and it also
ran counter to his instinct to kill the hoods because in their vileness he saw a
reflection of himself—his misdeeds, his crimes, his failures. According to
Nietzsche, pity is a chief cause of decadence, in which man’s instincts are
thwarted to the point where individuals prefer what is harmful to them—that is,
when weakness is chosen over power. Although the lieutenant’s life was in a
self-destructive mode, a Nietzschean perspective would assert that if he had
killed the thugs, it would have at least been part of his natural state, and in that
way, representative of lesser human decline. By the film’s end, the lieutenant’s
instincts have been blunted to the degree that he lets his guard down and is shot
to death in his car.
The Addiction
Having experimented with the narrative possibilities of the slasher,
revenge, and crime film genres, in 1995 in The Addiction, Ferrara turned his
philosophical lens toward the vampire film. In The Addiction, Lili Taylor plays a
New York University graduate student who is bitten by a vampire queen
(Annabella Sciorra) and then slowly and agonizingly descends into the hellish,
blood-lusting netherworld of vampirism. In typical Ferrara fashion, the director
transforms a tired genre into an intellectual exploration into the nature of evil.
The Addiction resonates with the haunting sense that the reason there is so much
evil in the world is because people are inherently evil.
Within a Nietzschean framework, The Addiction is an angry indictment
of such fundamental Christian principles as pity, mercy, and sacrifice. The
vampires in Ferrara’s film contend that evil rather than good, dark rather than
light, represents the true condition of man. Christianity is challenged as
contradictory of life because it champions that which is weak and that which
domesticates human beings like animals. From this position, that which alters
the natural state of man is ill-constituted because it reduces individuals to little
more than “herd animals” conditioned by the promise of a nebulous afterlife.
The film’s vampires and the Christians they discount all seek
immortality, but in starkly contrasting ways. The vampires seek an immortality
analogous to the type sought by secular postmodern society. This is informed by
French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s observation:
What is being set in place here is . . . the immortality of the
species in real time. We long ago stopped believing in the
immortality of the soul, a deferred immortality. We no longer
believe in that immortality which assumed a transcending of
the end, an intense investment in the finalities of the beyond
and a symbolic elaboration of death. What we want is the
immediate realization of immortality by all possible means. At
this millennium end, we have all, in fact, become millenarian: