In the Flesh: Bad Lieutenant

“ Jesus turned water to wine,” says the nameless nun (Frankie Thorn) to her confessor, discussing her rape at the hands of two young men. “I ought to have turned bitter semen to fertile sperm -- hatred to love. And maybe to have saved their souls. They did not love me. I ought to have loved them. As Jesus loved those who reviled him.” It’s a staggering declaration, the kind of human act that takes your breath away whether you find it repulsive, delusional, saintly, or terrifying. Traumatized and battered, this woman’s first thought for her assailants is of charity, of making her body a sacrifice in the way Christ made a sacrifice of his. For the rest of Bad Lieutenant’s runtime, we follow the kind of people to whom she extends this almost otherworldly grace. The titular lieutenant (Harvey Keitel) lurches through a lawless demimonde of drug abuse, casual brutality, and sexual violence, an avatar of everything wrong with the police as an institution, of everything sick and rotten in the American spirit, making a mockery of the nun’s sacrifice with his every stinking breath.

And make no mistake, the New York director Abel Ferrara and writer Zoë Lund conjure is a Sodom in the Biblical mold, its gutters festering with human putrescence, its people animated by spite and selfishness, heroin and cash. The Lieutenant goes from haranguing his children to stealing from robbers to line his own pockets to shooting up to sneaking a peek at a nude rape victim through her hospital door. He’s all animus, devoid of principle, resentful when asked to believe in anything whether it’s family or his badge or Catholicism. On his second visit to his dealer, played by Lund herself, she rambles as she gives him his fix that vampires have it easier than people, that their parasitism is actual and material and involves the theft of tangible resources. Humans are forced to make do with proxies which serve only as distractions that the only currency we have to burn in pursuit of our appetites is our own bodies and life force. All we can really eat is ourselves. In that light we can see the Lieutenant and New York around him as raging at their fate, devouring themselves in pursuit of an impossible immortality.

“I’m too fuckin’ weak,” the Lieutenant sobs to an apparition of Christ (Vincent Laresca) who appears to him after the nun rejects his appeal for revenge on her attackers. “You have to help me.” What help can you offer a man like this? What kind of a gift is grace, and what kind of a burden? Why do the nun’s attackers steal the church’s chalice with the host still inside it? A cop laughs at the idea that they were seeking absolution, but is it so far-fetched? There’s an unfortunate racial thorn in the movie’s paw here, with the Hispanic assailants functioning primarily as voiceless aggressors who after their assault on the nun exist primarily to reflect and receive the moral choices of the film’s other characters, but even marred by this elision of their full humanity, the film’s final hour is a staggering monument to Catholic guilt and dysfunction, to addiction and forgiveness, and to mercy in the face of hate.