IGUANAS AND VICODIN

I was talking with a close but routinely argumentative friend of mine last night, and we stumbled upon a rare moment of agreement: we both believe that Nicolas Cage’s performance in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans might just be the best of his career. There’s perhaps some stiff competition from his roles as H.I. McDunnough in the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona (1987) and Charlie Kaufman in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), but Bad Lieutenant stands out as his most "uncaged" performance—allowing him to showcase the full spectrum of his idiosyncratic quirks in a role that seems tailor-made for his unique eccentricities as an actor. And as a spiritual successor to the mad performances of Klaus Kinski in earlier Herzog films, Cage doesn’t appear to bat an eyelid when meeting the challenge head-on—and why should he? He’s Nicolas Cage.

So, this bonkers Cage/Herzog collaboration is a total subversion of the clichéd binary morality of good and evil that Hollywood films so often revert to. It has zero interest in punishing the degenerate cop, Lt. Terence McDonough (Cage), and instead allows him to get away scot-free with his litany of indiscretions throughout the film. There’s something cathartic about realising that here we have a cop—unlike Harvey Keitel in Abel Ferrara’s original Bad Lieutenant—who doesn’t wrestle with his soul for being a corrupt and odious figure and seek any form of redemption through penitance. Instead, he finds a strange freedom in the nihilistic amorality of his life and his role enforcing the law according to his own twisted moral sensibility. The closest one could argue he gets to redemption of sorts is his Quixotic fascination with a Sterling silver spoon he found with a metal detector his mother had given him when he was young believing it to belong to pirates who came up the Mississippi to bury treasure.

In this sense, McDonough is a true renegade of cinema. Thanks to the dark comedic tone maintained throughout, we should—at least ideally—revel in his relentless pursuit of sin and debauchery, much like we might cheer for an outlaw in a Western. Any second-guessing of his purely self-gratifying hedonism would instantly sink the entire premise of the film, leaving us feeling the shame we expect McDonough to feel—before we come to understand what Cage, Herzog, and screenwriter William M. Finkelstein are really getting at.

Adding to Herzog’s playful seduction of darkness is the fact that this movie was made a few years before political correctness became more than just a phrase—before it evolved into an essentially mandated way of life for culture and society, straitjacketing creatives from taking daring risks like this one. Could a film like this be made today? Possibly—but it still feels somehow forbidden in its parody of morality, almost pre-empting the arrival of the virtue-signaling zealots lurking just around the corner.

And if one scene exemplifies the pure anarchy of the film, it's surely when McDonough, high on Vicodin for his back pain, is surveilling a crime scene and notices a pair of iguanas in the corner of the room—with one that appears to be singing along with Johnny Adams’s definitive version of Release Me.