Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

In a story in his latest book, narrated by the Hep C virus, Will Self riffs on the “slapstick of addiction.” “Slapstick is, in essence, the ritualized worship of causation, something humans place more faith in than they do their gods,” he writes. “Anyone watching a comedian attempting to do two things at once – or even one – will be familiar with this instinctive belief.” Watching hypomanic Nicholas Cage, in the early throws of cocaine psychosis, do even one thing at once in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans proves a recipe for high highwire comedy indeed. Like Wile E. Coyote pursuing a fix bigger than God, he rushes into and out of concentric, inward-eddying happenings, vamping like Red Skelton on rotgut, hobbled like Olivier in Richard, Duke of Gloucester mode, hovering at the edge of the wolf pack to sniff out weird mushrooms, whilst employing some seriously advanced intuitive drunken monkey kung fu. Turns out he is doing two things at once, whether he is in-the-moment aware of it or not. He is an addict, bien sûr, but he never stops being the decorated hero cop. Dude gets his man, he just takes the scenic route is all, roughing up grannies if he has to. Maybe not so scenic. The post-Katrina New Orleans of Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant non-remake is somewhere between Western ghost town and movie-movie backlot. There are plenty of cars but no people, most of the action taking place in any-place-whatevers – the police stations, crime scenes, sports bars, luxury mob apartments, casinos, and rustic hideouts of any given Steven Seagal movie. Directing Nicholas Cage to (cue Bavarian accent) “let the hog loose,” Herzog gives the actor plenty of room to spree. And let the hog loose he does. All over what is essentially a hopped-up Don Siegel picture w/ those cool oldschool crane-shot urban reveals. The police procedural, like slapstick, is all about causation. One clue leads to another leads to a shakedown leads up the ladder leads to the kingpin. This is precisely what happens in Port of Call, except that Cage’s vulpine piggy is running on schizzed-out midbrain instinct, forced to improvise at the speed of sound. Out hero is not a user of intravenous drugs: he is a snorter, a smoker, a popper. It is always go-time. A race to get up on the stress hormone. The accidental inhalation of heroin requires a hard-slog over to his girlfriend’s (a prostitute who looks-like-a-starlet-because-she-is, of course) to get the alkaloid antidote lest he need, you know, sit down for a spell. Like all addicts, Lieutenant Terence McDonagh’s cure for existential loneliness is isolation. He is locked into his own mad monadology. People are projections on a screen, action movie ciphers as much for him as they are for us. They can’t touch him. The limbic compromise of his reptile brain causes him to see iguanas, like the lobsters and crabs that followed Sartre around for a couple years after he took mescaline. Alleygators get under his skin. Herzog’s one Herzogean touch in the visual field is the employment of reptile-cam – insert shots in extreme wide-angle of scaly neo-cortex topographies connected to Cage's dopey backgrounded gaze. The other thing the good Lieutenant has in common w/ all addicts in active addiction (and I should know), is the backward slapstick skip of ethics as they retreat up the beach to allow for the incoming tide of dependency. Counterintuitively, Port of Call actually suggests the efficacy of these tremendously pliable ethological gradations and degradations, first because their playing out is very funny, and second because they somehow work … for a while. The film isn’t so much a celebration of addiction, then, as a kind of marveling at it. Where Abel Ferrera’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant saw abjection and aberration put a man of faith back on his knees, Port of Call’s hero practices the wrong kind of surrender all together, but an immanent plane of causation yields to him all the same, the way Buster Keaton might accidentally fall into the exact place he needs to be. The reptile comes out on top by chance, and the hog, somehow, is vindicated. It’s luck ‘til luck runs out. And we need luck. We do. But we need a human connection, and I don't buy the variety served up here in the dénouement. You can't have it both ways.