Iguana Town

2009's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans has been on Criterion Channel for a while so I watched it again. I can't believe it's fifteen years old, it still feels like a recent movie. Legendary director Werner Herzog makes movies all the time, often attracting star talent, but it's kind of rare for any of his movies to break through into mainstream consciousness. His Bad Lieutenant achieved some notice thanks to the perfect casting of its star, Nicholas Cage, delivering one of his most memorable madman performances.

The key to his character is that he suffers a back injury at the start of the film that leaves him in constant physical pain for the rest of his life. You can see that pain in every second of Cage's performance, too.

The movie is somewhat mysteriously linked to Abel Ferrara's 1992 film Bad Lieutenant--some sources say Herzog's film was meant to be a second in a franchise all along, some say the two stories had nothing to do with each other, that Herzog's film was slapped with the name but some opportunistic producer. But it's hard not to see Herzog's film as a counterargument to Ferrara's, which is about a bad cop played by Harvey Keitel who has a religious experience, leading to him becoming a true agent of justice. Herzog's film argues that this hypothetical lieutenant can be good and bad at the same time, shifting from circumstance to circumstance for occasionally explicable reasons. The man is in constant pain, most of us can't imagine what that's like, so it puts a perpetual asterisk on all of his actions. How much responsibility does he have for his actions, does he bear more responsibility for some actions than he does for others? It's a very noir kind of existential question.

The movie is so "street", with it's intimate and complex knowledge of drug and police culture in New Orleans, it hardly feels like a Herzog film. Herzog's presence is better felt in dreamlike moments like Cage's visions of iguanas and his line at the end, pondering whether or not fish dream.

His relationship with Eva Mendes' character is strangely sweet. She's really sexy in this movie and it was nice screenwriter William Finkelstein didn't write her as the typical strung out shrew.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet #1903

Including hay, the horse's home was full.
Aversion choked the guest from ringing bells.
A linen flag depicts a frightened bull.
Arranged about his hooves are seven hells.
Like boxing rocks, the pointless fight was dumb.
Consorting crabs would stick their pincers out.
Dominions damned the life of Wrigley's gum.
It clogged the cruel crustacean's kettle spout.
The aging picture cleaned the error town.
Abroad, the place retained a scruffy life.
The people play beneath a sky of brown.
The clouds were thick beyond the cutting knife.
A turtle team invades the peaceful cloud.
Attack was swift and cruel but never loud.