Bad Lieutenant’s not going to appreciate itself, you know. For best results, read parts I, II, III, IV, and V on this very blog.
Welcome back, dear readers. We now return to our scene-for-scene look at Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, the cult-film curio from Werner Herzog. Our last installment trailed a demure Nicolas Cage as he adopted a nonsensical accent and worked to solve the film’s MacGuffin murder case. Cage’s histrionics and Herzog’s wild tangents took a back seat to the film’s skeleton: its script. Like some overbearing authority figure, William Finkelstein‘s screenplay broke up the party and demanded some tangible action. But what is Bad Lieutenant without Herzog and Cage’s enabling relationship, which hijacks a by-the-numbers script and sends it headlong into lunacy?
We begin this installment with Cage, Xzibit, and a few of the rapper/actor’s henchmen. Xzibit parks his Escalade along the New Orleans waterfront. As his cronies dispose of a dead body, Xzibit lays out a business proposal.
Over a roving, 50-second long take, Xzibit chats about his plans to buy cheap riverfront property and sell it to salivating real estate developers. He asks Cage to be the front man for his operation; never mind that he hardly knows Cage and has no real reason to trust him. The story calls for the men to interact, and so they do, logic be damned. Here we get some textbook lazy character development. Given Xzibit’s late entrance into the film — he doesn’t have a substantial scene until well past the movie’s halfway point — Herzog and Finkelstein cram a lot of plot into a tight time frame. By film’s end, of course, Bad Lieutenant drops the pretense and begins to openly mock such plot contrivances.
The men get back in Xzibit’s car and drive away. Herzog then presents the following two images:
A body of water and a city in ruins. See a connection? Throughout Bad Lieutenant, Cage is flanked by damaged buildings and empty lots. Herzog never lulls on these details; they appear in passing, always in our periphery. Through subtle juxtapositions like this one here, he reminds us of the film’s setting: post-Katrina New Orleans. To be sure, Bad Lieutenant doesn’t have anything to say about Katrina or New Orleans. The disaster, though, does foster the film’s central metaphor: Through its rising waters, the hurricane ushers wildlife — iguanas, crocodiles, fish, snakes — into man’s realm. A uniquely Herzogian take on man and the natural world ensues.
Cage enters his car and immediately spots a drug deal involving one of the film’s marginal characters: Renaldo Hayes (Noel Arthur). In the land of over-plotted police dramas, contrived run-ins are king. Cage, if you recall, has a side-plot gambling problem. He recently lost several thousand dollars on Louisiana, a team that just happens to call Hayes its star quarterback. A variation of this ludicrous coincidence appears in Abel Ferrara‘s original Bad Lieutenant.
Cage frisks Arthur and finds a bag of pot.
Arthur begs Cage to let him go with a warning. Instead, Cage offers an insane ultimatum: Either I bust you and kill your NFL dreams, or you lose the upcoming game or win by just five or less. It’s an absurd idea, and Cage delivers his lines with appropriately breathless mania. I love the way he shoots his eyebrows and gulps mid-sentence for air.
Hayes appears to take the deal.
Herzog then cuts to Cage as he drives Xzibit and his cackling henchmen. Xzibit et al. have just acquired a shipment of “that Taliban shit,” thanks to Cage’s intel. The men revel in their stress-free pick-up as Cage drives in silence. Then, without the slightest warning, Cage shouts, “Hey! Sup!” to get their attention (more on this “trying to sound black” gag in a second). The man wants his $15,000. Xzibit tells him to relax, at which point Cage whips out a gun and coos, “Tell me again to relax” with hilarious nonchalance.
You can’t put a price on Cage’s casual delivery here. The introduction of a gun should have some serious dramatic consequences, right? Cage just pulled a gun on one of the biggest drug dealers in New Orleans, and he has his back to the dealer’s most trusted men. Shouldn’t some tension ensue? In a normal movie — or, you know, real life — wouldn’t Xzibit and his men react with a little more anger? In this movie, the scene plays as though Cage pulled out a banana. His death-wish move comes with no logical consequences. Once again, Herzog and his actors mock the material; they play a life-and-death moment with no interest in quickening our pulse.
Xzibit tells Cage he’ll get the money tomorrow. Cage uncocks his gun and mutters, with no conviction, “I’ll kill you.” And so the most lazily serious scene in crime drama history turns into full-on farce. Cage, like an actor who just flubbed a line, lets a smirk slip past his face. The scene effectively tips its hand, revealing what it’s really about: getting a laugh.
It’s a character-breaking smile, the kind you see before a director shouts, “Cut!” But the camera just keeps rolling. Cage dribbles some more nonsense: “I’ll kill all of you…to the break of dawn. To the break of daaaawn, baby!” He cracks up the entire car, even looking to the backseat for a reaction to his joke.
This is what Bad Lieutenant‘s all about. Actors run through a scene, hit the minimal plot points, and then the real scene begins. Either they start improvising or Herzog goes down some strange rabbit hole. Together, Cage and Herzog riff off otherwise humdrum material, like a pair of virtuosos soloing over a simple melody. The way Cage delivers the line like an ad-lib, the way his fellow actors burst into laughter — the moment feels like an outtake that somehow sneaked into the final product. Because really: Why watch a rote police procedural when you could watch Cage make the “Pimp My Ride” dude laugh with his new catchphrase?
The freewheeling silliness spills into the next scene. As Cage’s bookie (Brad Dourif) stands alone in a sports bar, we hear a voice shout “Sup! Sup! Sup!” off camera.
Cage screams the word five times before he even appears on screen. Like the “Renaldo Hayes!” joke from earlier in the film, the scene opens with a needlessly disorienting Cage outburst. You know, for shits and gigs. The “Sup!” shouting also echoes the previous scene, when Cage silenced a car full of drug dealers with the same word. Throughout Bad Lieutenant, Cage adopts and abandons such odd catchphrases and verbal tics. Recall the old-timey gangster voice and his love of the name G, for starters. Now, in two consecutive scenes, Cage barks “Sup!” as though it were a Tourettic fixation. It’s a word he won’t use again after this scene.
Cage storms into the frame and quiets Dourif with $10,000, which he stuffs down the bookie’s shirt.
Cage delivers the $5,000 he owes and places a new $5,000 bet on Louisiana, whom he hopes will win courtesy of his blackmail effort on Renaldo Hayes. For good measure, he shouts “Sup!” one last time. Cage plays to his animated strengths here; the 35-second long take lets him chew the scenery raw. I love the way he bellows his illegal bet in a public place and violates Dourif’s personal space as much as possible.
He places his bet and leaves before Dourif can scold him anymore.
After two scenes of dizzying silliness, Bad Lieutenant takes a serious dip in cabin pressure. The mischief stops with another single-take sequence, this one lasting over 60 seconds. Cage returns to his father’s house, drugs in hand, eager to share with his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes). Mendes, in one of her moments of Serious Acting, tells Cage she wants to go to an AA meeting with his father.
Just then, as if timed in the heavens (or, you know, a Hollywood screenplay), Cage’s father (Tom Bower) appears in the doorway and tells Mendes it’s time to go.
The low-key lighting and hushed voices hint at a supposedly pivotal moment of character development. Bower and Mendes head for their meeting, leaving Cage to question his own life choices. Just in time, of course, for some obligatory third-act revelations, in which all our characters learn a thing or two, make some changes, and overcome obstacles to succeed in the end.
Why does Herzog plop this humorless scene amid Cage’s hysterics? Moreover, why does Bad Lieutenant shift gears with the grace of a kid on a learner’s permit? As we’ve discussed, the herky-jerk tone stems from the film’s schizophrenic authorship. A police procedural and quasi-sequel devolves into unmitigated excess (thanks to Cage) and then becomes a vehicle for one man’s personal obsessions (thanks to Herzog). Tonal inconsistency is usually a bad thing, yes, but it can also serve as the lifeblood of subversive cult cinema. Bad Lieutenant ping-pongs between the conventional and the deranged, using the latter to highlight the banality of the former.
Before the film’s orgiastic climax, we sit through one more conventional number. Cage, brooding from his encounter at his father’s place, drives to Mendes’ apartment to fetch her clothes. Somber music plays as Cage sifts through her dresser. He finds a framed photo of himself in uniform and wordlessly wonders about the kind of man he’s become. Behold: The subtlety and visual panache of a Lifetime movie.
As Cage loads his car with Mendes’ stuff, the musical cues shift from mournful to ominous. Cage, if you recall, owes a trio of gangsters quite a bit of money. That forgettable subplot has returned to rear its head.
The thug car trails Cage as he leaves Mendes’ high-rise.
And so, at last, we arrive at Bad Lieutenant‘s pièce de résistance: a crack-fueled showdown at Xzibit’s palace. The scene starts on a note of pure gangster-movie grace. As Xzibit takes a hit of crack, Herzog zooms below his desk to reveal a gun trained on Cage.
Having just established the scene’s power dynamics, Herzog shifts them with the next shot: an eye-line match on Cage’s face, from which we can infer that he can see the gun. In two shots and zero lines of dialogue, Herzog lays the groundwork for an ensuing gun fight with something akin to minimalist gangster poetry.
Cage leaps from his chair to take a hit of crack. Exhaling, he makes the first in a series of poster-worthy faces. For the rest of the scene, Herzog lets his beast roam un-Caged.
Like all men who’ve just taken a giant hit of crack, Cage starts to talk business. He proposes that — in place of the $15k Xzibit owes him — he gets 25% of the uncut dope from their recent pick-up. Xzibit says he’ll sell him the dope at his new, marked-up price. Cage replies with a “joke” one should probably never use with an actual drug dealer: “That’s one way of looking at it. The other is, you get to keep 75% and not go to prison for the rest of your life.” You can practically see the crack work through Cage’s system. As he delivers the line, he sits upright and his entire body shakes. He’s just so excited for his punchline.
He explodes with laughter at his own proposal. Even by Nicolas Cage standards, his laugh rings like an over-the-top, gasket-bursting affectation.
Amazingly, Xzibit doesn’t seem amused. Cage just masked a threat to arrest him with his own hyperventilating laughter.
Xzibit agrees to sell the dope at the original price, not the mark-up. Cage then starts to load sloppy spoonfuls of dope into a baggie. We spot this silliness for less than a second before Herzog tilts the camera away. Why would Xzibit let Cage shovel his product all over the table? In what world would a drug dealer measure 25% of his supply with such little care? The scene, thank god, doesn’t let logic get in the way of a good joke.
Cage then launches into a berserk rant about some man named “Nigga Elk.” I don’t know how one would even script such a moment. Cage, from what I can piece together, decides to tell an unsolicited story about Renaldo Hayes. Cage’s breathless storytelling is, in this writer’s opinion, some of the funniest shit ever. The man is way too excited about the story to tell it competently. His sped-up, chopped-up delivery (“I was watching TV. The game. Yeah?”) suggests a man unhinged. Apparently, while watching a football game on TV, Cage once saw a player sprout antlers like a gazelle.
Cage wheezes toward the story’s “punchline”: “He ran ran ran…He scored a TOUCHDOWN!” An atomic bomb of laughter detonates inside the man.
I simply adore the way he screams “touchdown!” as if it’s the craziest word possible to end a story about football. The only non-insane part of his story somehow gets the biggest chuckle out of him.
One of the henchmen worries about Cage’s crack intake, to which Cage shoots back, “Listen, I’m not worried about you, so don’t be concerned about me. Cuz I’m not concerned if you’re not concerned, so don’t worry…” Then he laughs some more. His delirious rebuttal actually holds a bit of truth. This is how intoxication really makes me think and talk. Cage rambles like a drugged-out man who knows his euphoric wave could crash with the faintest of negative vibes.
Xzibit tells Cage to calm down. He also casually admits — for the first time — to killing the Senegalese family from the beginning of the film. Remember them? Bad Lieutenant was supposed to be about an unstable cop who solves those murders. How far the film has strayed.
Cage responds to Xzibit’s kvetching with more inspired nonsense: “Easy, easy, easy, cuz I ain’t Eazy E.” The men laugh, once again, as though riffing during an outtake. The film’s ramshackle, tangent-rich quality even tickles them. This joke in particular feels like a character-breaking ad lib, given that both Eazy E and Xzibit were members of the West Coast rap scene.
The laughter ends when a nameless woman, presumably the mother of Xzibit’s child, enters the room. Xzibit barks at her to leave and throws a paperweight, furious for some reason. This total digression, I suppose, reminds us viewers that Xzibit is not a nice man. Cage uses the moment as a diversion to slyly introduce his “lucky crack pipe” into the scene. He takes a hit and tells Xzibit that he absolutely has to try it himself.
Cage extends his hand to offer the crack pipe. As he does so, Herzog pans and zooms in on Xzibit’s face, giving the moment a heightened sense of importance. We’ll understand why in a few minutes. He also holds the shot for 40-some seconds. The camera movement, shot duration, and the silence as Xzibit takes his hit are all subtle cues that we should be paying attention to this moment.
A female scream pierces through the silence as the three thugs burst into Xzibit’s office. Cage tells the men that he’s getting their money as they speak. Xzibit, of course, has no idea why these strangers have just stormed his house, guns drawn.
Cage offers the men his bag of dope, which totals more than the amount he owes. He tosses the bag for them to take. Apparently those giant spoonfuls were a precise enough means to measure one-quarter of Xzibit’s dope. The head goombah (played by screenwriter William Finkelstein) suggests he’ll take all the dope, including Xzibit’s share. Xzibit asks why he’d steal from him, to which Finkelstein replies:
Well, there was a time when I wouldn’t have. I woulda taken what’s mine and left the rest on the table. But you see I never got rich enough to retire, I’m stuck doing this shit, and I’m not young anymore. So now I don’t leave nothing on the table.
Finkelstein, it seems, saves his best dialogue for himself. This pulpy noir monologue introduces just a dash of relatable sincerity to an otherwise cartoonish character. He delivers his lines with a distinct, almost musical cadence. His acting chops seem to surpass his skills as a feature-length screenwriter.
Finkelstein orders one of his goons to collect the dope, at which point we hear a left-field harmonica begin to play.
Herzog fans will recognize the song as the howling bluesy number that ends Stroszek. That film gave us a dancing chicken; this one gives us a dancing soul.
As the goon reaches for the drugs, Xzibit fires his concealed shotgun.
And so begins one of the strangest shootouts in cinematic history. The blistering music and camera moves conceal the relatively anti-climactic nature of the gun fight. Xzibit’s men shoot and kill Finkelstein and his thugs in just 10 seconds. The scene, as scripted ends here.
But the film keeps rolling. In an unscripted move, Cage demands that they shoot Finkelstein again because “his soul is still dancing.” He laughs his sociopathic laugh once more.
Herzog then pans to a faceless man who sports a red jacket like Finkelstein. He represents, we presume, Finkelstein’s soul. The man breakdances around the dead bodies. Notice the nearby jukebox, which seems to suggest that the harmonica wails are somehow emanating from it.
Herzog zooms on Cage as he stares in stupefied awe, much as he did with the hallucinatory iguanas from before.
The ten-second shootout gives way to over a minute of breakdancing souls, Cage’s crack-infused laughter, Herzog’s rootsy music, and, you guessed it, iguanas.
Cage prompts the men to shoot him again once more, which they do. Then, as if waiting for its cue to enter, an iguana slinks across across the floor.
What to make of this boozy cocktail? More so than any other scene, the sequence encapsulates Bad Lieutenant as a whole. All the film’s chief elements are in play: the pulpy noir plot, Herzog’s wild revisions to the script, and Cage’s feral theatrics. The scene, which takes enormous liberties with the screenplay, goes so far as to depict several actors murdering the screenwriter. It wasn’t enough to simply butcher his script. The narrative, hijacked by Cage and Herzog, culminates with the screenwriter’s on-screen death. It’s enough to make me grin just thinking about it.
The shootout also captures the hilariously lopsided imbalance between the film’s plot and Herzog’s personal expression. The gunfight itself lasts a mere 10 seconds; the closing shot of a slithering iguana runs longer than that. Herzog films the plot point in a no-frills, economical fashion, but only so he has more time to relish in his own tangential indulgences. The scene’s core function — the killing of Finkelstein and his men — gets an enormous, bulbous tumor attached to it.
In this scene, as in all of Bad Lieutenant, the stuff of textbook noir (shootouts, drugs, converging plot lines) gets abstracted beyond recognition. Bad Lieutenant, let’s not forget, is one of Herzog’s only films for which he doesn’t have a writing credit. Herzog could have taken a director-for-hire approach to this material. Instead, he brazenly pervades it with his own trademarks and themes. Like the classic-era greats who inspired the auteur theory, Herzog imbues a star-filled, slick-looking product with his own personal voice. But where men like Hitchcock left artful authorial imprints on the material, Herzog refashions the script with total disregard for tone and cohesion. His directorial augments become impossible-to-ignore distractions from the story. And so Bad Lieutenant will never be considered a well-made commercial product or a polished genre film. It trades those virtues for something far more fun: cult status.
This concludes part six of our scene-for-scene look at Bad Lieutenant. Check back soon for the seventh and final installment.
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