To take my review Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans by Werner Herzog, a notch deeper. Freudian Death Wish is not a death wish at all. A good rule of thumb with these concepts is to turn the obvious reading on its head. The Death Wish is the desire to control the most uncontrollable event, to become a master of own destiny. Freud’s Death Wish is an attempt to reach for the eternity, to become transcendent, to live forever and ever.
The Bad Lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) is the latest in line of the characters who can only become good by being bad. This mirroring of good and evil classically played out between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the 1995 hit “Heat”. There Al Pacino is faced with the eternal dilemma – to catch the bad guys he must enter their world, become as bad as the bad itself. Can he stay human in the process?
Fast froward to the Werner Herzog’s take on the subject. The Bad Lieutenant Terence McDonagh descends to the dark side, till he becomes indistinguishable from the criminals, he actually partners with the dealers and killers. He is a gambler, a junkie and by becoming part of a murder he solves the crime. Can he still remain a human? This is an open-ended question but there is hope also involving a symmetry and a reversal. In the beginning of the movie the Bad Lieutenant unselfishly saves the life of a prisoner and sustains a life long injury. The same former prisoner appears in the last frames of the film to save the Bad Lieutenant’s life, again a symbolic reversal. Also in a reversal the killer Big Fate is dreaming of being ” good”, of turning the town around, of a legitimate businessmen as he disposes a corpse.
But there is another character, the Jewish gangster Eugene Gratz (Marco St. John) who seems without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. We know he is a Jew because the writer William Finkelstein (of LA Law fame) makes him say two Yiddish code words – shvantz and punim. And true to the symmetry he must be the very goodness in the evil disguise. In an unscripted moment Werner Herzog shows his swirling soul dance after he is murdered, he is the transcendent. Growing up in the postwar Bavaria, Hertzog knows a thing or two about those hovering souls.
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