And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
Harvey Keitel plays this man with such uncompromised honesty that the performance can only be called courageous; not many actors would want to be seen in this light.
“Bad Lieutenant” tells the story of a man who is not comfortable inside his body or soul. He walks around filled with need and dread.
He is in the last stages of cocaine addiction, gulping booze to level off the drug high. His life is such a loveless hell that he buys sex just for the sensation of someone touching him, and his attention drifts even then, because there are so many demons pursuing him.
The lieutenant has no illusions about himself. He is bad and knows he is bad, and he abuses the power of his position in every way he can. Interrupting a grocery store stickup, he sends the beat cop away and then steals the money from the thieves. He sells drug dealers their immunity by taking drugs from them. In the film’s most harrowing scene, he stops two teenage girls who are driving their parents’ car without permission. He threatens them with arrest, and then engages in an act of verbal rape.
We learn a few things about him. He still lives in a comfortable middle-class home, with a wife and three children who have long since made their adjustment to his madness. There is no longer a semblance of marriage. He comes in at dawn and collapses on the couch, to be wakened by the TV cartoons, which cut through his hangover. He stumbles out into the world again, to do more evil. When he drives the kids to school, his impatience is palpable; he cannot wait to drop them off and get a fix.
A nun is raped. He visits the hospital to see her. She knows who attacked her, but will not name them, because she forgives them.
The lieutenant is stunned. He cannot imagine this level of absolution. If a woman can forgive such a crime, is redemption possible even for him? The film dips at times into madness. In a church, he hallucinates that Jesus Christ has appeared to him. He no longer knows for sure what the boundaries of reality are. His temporary remedies – drugs and hookers – have stopped working. All that remains are selfloathing, guilt, deep physical disquiet, and the hope of salvation.
“Bad Lieutenant” was directed by Abel Ferrara, a gritty New Yorker who has come up through the exploitation ranks (“Ms. 45,” “Fear City”) to low budget but ambitious films like “China Girl,” and “Cat Chaser.” This film lacks the polish of a more sophisticated director, but would have suffered from it. The film and the character live close to the streets. The screenplay is by Ferrara and Zoe Lund, who can be seen onscreen as a hooker. They are not interested in plot in the usual sense. There is no case to solve, no crime to stop, no bad guys except for the hero.
Catholic Guilt and Grace: The film is steeped in Catholic iconography. The Lieutenant's journey is a modern "Via Dolorosa" (Way of Grief), where he must reach the absolute bottom of human depravity before he can encounter the divine.
The Nature of Forgiveness: The nun’s radical act of absolution acts as a mirror to the Lieutenant's nihilism. It suggests that if the most heinous crimes can be forgiven, no soul is beyond saving.
Addiction as Enslavement: The film depicts addiction not just to substances (cocaine, heroin, alcohol), but to power and the "rush" of the gamble.
Harvey Keitel's Performance
Keitel's portrayal of the "LT" is a masterclass in vulnerability and physical commitment.
Fearlessness: Keitel bared everything, including his physical body and his emotional state, in scenes of drug-fueled hallucinations and a famous, agonized breakdown in a church where he screams at an apparition of Christ.
Improvisation: Much of the film’s dialogue and the Lieutenant's manic energy came from Keitel’s improvisational choices, working closely with Ferrara's loose directorial style.
NC-17 Rating: Upon its release, the film was given an NC-17 rating for its graphic drug use, sexual violence, and pervasive profanity.
Gritty Realism: Shot on the streets of New York (and some parts of Jersey City) with a low budget and often without permits, the film captures a grimy, "pre-gentrified" Manhattan that feels documentary-like in its authenticity.
Zoë Lund: The co-writer, who also plays the Lieutenant's heroin connection, provided a philosophical depth to the screenplay, including the haunting monologue: "Vampires are lucky; they can feed on others. We gotta eat away on ourselves."
Legacy
While initially polarizing, Bad Lieutenant has grown in stature as a landmark of independent cinema. Martin Scorsese famously named it one of the best films of the 1990s. It remains a definitive example of "transgressive" art that uses the language of exploitation films to tell a deeply spiritual story.
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