It's easy to spot in people like me. The
cancer's grown obvious. But you're as terminal as I am, you know
that? You're as addicted as I am. It's the nature of the organism.
Now look me in the face and tell me to go. Look sin in the face and
tell it to go. Say it with authority.
Bram Stoker's novel Dracula
evokes true horror, a sense of eternal corruption and moral dread.
Alas, most films the book has inspired reduce that revulsion at
spiritual evil to merely mortal terror. They're nothing but scary
action movies, Good Guys In Peril flicks where the threat happens to be
neck bites rather than gunshot wounds or chainsaw lacerations.
Sure, the blood-sucking is
creepy, and the erotic undercurrent adds a certain repugnance, but for
this viewer at least, the real Horror is to be found in the Vietnamese
heart of darkness Francis Ford Coppola uncovers in
Apocalypse Now, for
instance, or in a Holocaust film like Alain Resnais'
Night and Fog.
Abel Ferrarra invokes both of
those particular evils in The Addiction,
an explicitly theological Horror film that uses vampirism as a stand-in
for the contagious and predatory evil that lives in the human heart.
He's playing for keeps, he and his screenwriting partner Nicholas St.
John, invoking a host of philosophical heavy hitters who've weighed in
on the question of evil. ""Sartre, Beckett, Baudelaire - you think
they're works of fiction?" The film-makers are utterly serious, linking
genocide and wartime atrocities with the more domestic and familiar
evils of sexual coercion, inner city decay, disease and contagion,
addiction and – yes – intellectual pride. There is nothing arch or
cynical about this film: it is in earnest about the wickedness of the
human heart. Deadly earnest.
Lili Taylor is very fine as
Kathleen Conklin, a Ph.D. candidate who is violently attacked in a New
York passageway and, unable to resist her alluring attacker with
sufficient conviction, finds herself as suddenly desperate for a fix as
any first-time user of crack cocaine. Except for her, the drug of
choice is human blood. More precisely, it is the thrill of overpowering
another's will with her own. The actress charts the junkie's affectless
downward spiral with precision: it is as compelling and horrifying a
portrait of addiction as it is of moral decay.
Nicholas St. John is a devout
Christian, a dedicated follower of Saint Francis, and the story he tells
is resolutely human, his focus uncompromisingly personal. He eschews
the usual plot mechanics of vampire melodrama in favor of character
study, the machineries of despair. No Van Helsings chase black-caped
grad students through fog-bound streets, armed with wooden stakes or
expending their last ounce of strength to wrestle philosophy T.A.s into
the dawning sunlight. (Not that plenty of plenty of grad students
couldn't do with a little exercise and some sunshine, God knows...) His
story line is starkly linear, his thematic concern single-minded:
indeed, the narrative might feel simplistic if not for the ambiguity of
the film's final moments. What exactly has become of Kathleen? The
academic and theological references are at times heavy handed, but the
film maker's unflinching contemplation of human evil grounds those
abstractions in undeniable realities, and if the philosophizing is
sometimes rendered artlessly, the film 's visual power more than
compensates
Cinematographer Ken Kelsch gives
us a seductively lensed black and white world, filled with potent
visuals. At one point, bands of brilliant light filtered through noir-ish
venetian blinds press down upon Kathleen with palpable weight as the sun
rises. At another, the black humor of an initially jokey
faculty-reception-turned-nasty culminates in truly disturbing
high-contrast shots of feeding that are almost entirely black but
drained of all humour, and difficult to get out of the mind's eye
afterward. The restricted palette lends congruity to interpolated
documentary footage of My Lai and Dachau, and other presumably "real"
footage of New York City takes on a particular kind of menace:
sunglasses on ordinary pedestrians take on an ominous quality, shielding
wearers from the light, suggestive of an omnipresent threat.
And as much as
The Addiction is a
study of one woman's descent into darkness, the film insists from the
start that this taste for evil is common to us all. It opens with
images of the My Lai massacre, shown as part of a philosophy lecture.
Kathleen objects to the way the trial singled out one man, when an
entire nation was guilty. "How did he get over there? Who put the gun
in his hand? They say that he was guilty of killing women and babies.
How many bombs were dropped that did the exact same thing? How many
homes were destroyed? Who's in jail for that? ... I'm only saying, if
you're going to prosecute war crimes you better make sure more than one
man takes the blame for everything. It's ridiculous." A vampire gets
what are practically the film's last words, when she quotes from
theologian R.C. Sproule: "We're not sinners because we sin, but we sin
because we are sinners."
The Addiction
is not as strong a work as Ferrarra's other very Catholic exploration of
human depravity, Bad Lieutenant,
though it is better looking. The overt philosophizing can feel a tad
sophomoric. Viewers who are put off by that, or who don't buy St.
John's central argument about the universality of human evil, are likely
to have real problems with the interpolation of Holocaust footage, which
could seem gratuitous, or at least unearned. I imagine Jewish viewers
could be very troubled by a film that yokes the horror of the Holocaust
to the potentially campy mythology of vampirism – especially when the
antidote to such evil is rendered in such clearly Christian symbols as
crucifix and communion.
But for those of us who see Nazi atrocities, sexual predation and the
horrors of addiction issuing from the same dark place in the human heart
– every human heart – the film is a stunning reminder of the Bible's
uncompromising assertion that the proclivity to evil is common to us
all. I left this film deeply shaken, determined to meet the
ever-present temptations to spiritual and moral compromise with a
resistance far more passionate. "You think that's going to stop me?
Collaborator..."
- Ron Reed
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